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The Spirit of the South 



WILL WALLACE HARNEY 




BOSTON 
RICHARD G. BADGER 

The Gorham Press 
1909 



Copyright, 1909, hy Will Wallace Harney 



All Rights Reserved 






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J^e Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



To William Randolph Harney ^ without 
whose help and assurance this work could 
not have been written or published, this 
book is dedicated by his father 

WILLIAM WALLACE HARNEY 



PREFACE 

The reader may be interested to know if the 
writer has done anything but write verses and 
little stories of the South for the magazines. 

He is a descendant of that Revolutionary 
soldier, Lieutenant Jenathan Harney, who fought 
at Bunker Hill and Long Island; the son of John 
H. Harney, college president, editor of the first 
algebra published by an American, and for 
twenty-five years editor and publisher of the 
Louisville, Ky., Democrat, the leading journal 
of the party in the Southwest. 

Young Harney, the writer, began active life 
as a public school teacher in Louisville. In a 
service of five years his advanced classes induced 
the board of trustees to establish a high school, 
and in recognition of his services, Mr. Harney 
was made principal. After two successful ses- 
sions, the singular political insanity, Know- 
Nothingism, swept the city and elected a new 
board of trustees, who supplanted Mr. Harney 
by a successor who knew little enough to satisfy 
the principles of his party. 

As soon as the trustees of the Kentucky State 
University knew of Mr. Harney's release, he was 
appointed to a professorship in the Normal 
Department of Transylvania, at Lexington, Ky., 
which was held until the withdrawal of the State's 
endowment. As a graduate of the Louisville 
Law School, Mr. Harney returned to practice 
law in Louisville, but was soon after called as 
assistant editor to his father on the Louisville 
Democrat, This position was held until, after 



PREFACE 

his father's death, he became editor in chief. 
In August, 1868, he married Mary St. M. Ran- 
dolph, of the Virginia family, eldest daughter of 
Hon. W. M. Randolph, of New Orleans. After 
birth of a son, in 1869, his wife's health failed, 
and he removed to the wilds of South Florida. 
It was too late. The loss of his young wife left 
him with her infant son in the unsettled wilder- 
ness of South Florida, almost without resources. 
But the great editors of the Atlantic, Harper's, 
Lippincotfs, and other leading magazines, accepted 
his contributions, and that, dear reader, is the 
origin of these Southern songs and sketches 
offered a second time to a second generation. 
At the same time he entered a homestead, cleared 
and planted an orange grove with his own hands; 
built, with Judge Randolph's help, his residence, 
Pine Castle ; established a post office, to which the 
name was given, a schoolhouse and school, 
Sunday school and church service; promoted a 
railroad and station at Pine Castle. 

But his most effective service was his newspaper 
correspondence. In 1870 South Florida was an 
unsettled cow range, wholly unknown even to the 
agents of State and Federal Governments at Ocala 
and Tallahassee. The season was opportune; 
the winters had been severe. But when the 
Cincinnati Commercial, under that accomplished 
gentleman editor, Murat Halstead, invited corre- 
spondence, the monthly letters were followed by 
a rush of new settler colonists, Swedes, English, 
Union and Confederate soldiers. Correspondence 
with the New Orleans Times-Democrat and the 
Boston Courier completed the impulse. The 
writer promoted prospected railroads, started a 



PREFACE 

newspaper, The Bitter Sweet, at Kissimmee, to 
encourage river traffic by that river to and through 
Lake Okechobee to the sea. The effect of this 
correspondence is sketched in a recent letter to 
the Boston Courier, and the attraction of the 
unrivaled climate has interested the great novelists 
How ells and Chambers and others. 

The infant son grew and prospered. Edu- 
cated at home, at schools and college, he is in 
business, with a home and wife of his own. The 
story is the common story of the educated Ameri- 
can in the South, and I think in New England. 
Why should the writer call his collected songs 
and stories The Spirit of the South ? One must 
write of what one feels and sees. The writer 
has always lived in the South. The songs and 
stories are the romance of Southern lives; the 
daring exploits by sea and land. Do they not 
show the spirit of the South more than any 
formal study .? Please buy and read them. 



CONTENTS 



Preface v 

WhoWonthe Pretty Widow? .... 11 
Reverend Mr. Bland's Wrestle with the 

Chester White Hog 91 

A Western Seeress 123 

The Spirit of the South 157 

Adonais 159 

The Stab 161 

Catalina's Betrothal 161 

The Lighthouse Rock 164 

The Twilight of the Heart .... 166 

The Reapers 167 

The Old Canoe 169 

September 171 

An Old Georgia Manor House . . . 173 

Over the Sugar Kettles ..... 175 

The Angel of the Twilight .... 176 

The Long Dream 177 

U, S. M, Passenger Steamer .... 178 

Always 181 

Blindfolded 182 

Qasta Diva . . . .... . 18^ 



CONTENTS 

Florida Dawn 183 

The Spirit of Melody 184 

Baby and Mustard Playing Ball . . . 185 

The Moorings 190 

The Northern Snow 192 

Trout Fishing 194 

The Old Mill 195 

In Memory of the Confederate Dead . , 196 

The Ballad of the White Doe . ... 200 

Milking Time 204 

The Buried Hope 205 

The Bergamot Blossom 206 

Idle Words 207 

In Memoriam 207 

Jimmy's Wooing 208 

Fallen Leaves 210 

Coasting from Barbadoes 211 

The Phantom Train 212 

The Transit of Venus 213 

The Parting Soul 213 

The Golden Wedding 217 

South Florida Night 219 

The Greek Bow . 220 

The Little Fault 221 

Philo-Pcena 223 

Under the Rose 225 

After Dark 226 

Florida Indian Love Chant .... 227 



THE SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

BOOK I 
IN PROSE 



WHO WON THE PRETTY WIDOW 

PROLOGUE 

THIS is a story of the times of the" Great 
Rebelhon. It does not discuss political 
questions, but only presents an inside 
picture of the trials and sufferings of one 
who shared and sympathized with the mis- 
fortunes of a lost cause. 

A thousand stories, much better told, have 
delineated the hardships of the Northern 
wife in that period of desolation; may this 
one serve to illustrate the trials and en- 
durance of her Southern sister. 



11 



CHAPTER I 

ANNO CONFEDERATIONIS 1, and 
in the interregnum of Jefferson Davis, 
and the consulship of J. Davis and A. 
Stephens, there lived in the Province of 
Mississippi, and not far from a gentle stream 
that finds its devious way to a neighboring 
bayou, a very pretty orphan girl. Her house- 
hold consisted of an ancient maiden lady, 
and, occasionally, her uncle. To dispose of 
these at once, let us say that the ancient 
maiden lady soon found her wise way through 
the lines of the two armies; and the uncle, 
who was also her guardian, fell at the battle 
of Mill Springs, under General ZoUicoffer. 

As to the dwelling of our heroine, it was 
"built, as many other Southern residences are, 
apparently on a succession of afterthoughts. 
Isolated rooms and curious cupboards sud- 
denly developed themselves on the unwary, 
about the main building, or were stumbled 
over, in the surrounding enclosure, as if set 
out to cool. At a greater distance were the 
outhouses; with the negro quarters, gin and 
sugar houses, and barn beyond them. 

This pretty little orphan may be said to 
have been quite advanced in years, as she 
was exactly nineteen years older than the 
country in which she lived at the time our 

13 



14 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

story commences. Perhaps her fame ought 
to be considered equal to her years, inasmuch 
as two great sections spent three or four hun- 
dred thousand Hves, and endless dollars, to 
show that she was not just as old as the record 
in the family Bible testified. But, as her name 
is not found in any of the protocols and 
proclamations of that eventful period of 

Proclamations, the temptation to compare 
er with Helen of Troy is resisted. Let us 
be satisfied with the fact that she was a very 
pretty girl indeed. 

She was accomplished, and could play on 
the piano a great many selections from 
opera, and almost as many sweet old-fash- 
ioned airs, in which the elder generation 
took great delight. She knew French, so 
as not to speak it correctly, and a little draw- 
ing, and a little botany and a great deal of 
school chemistry of a very confusing nature 
to the learned and unlearned. She was a 
skilful dressmaker, too, and knew how to 
adorn that perishable little body of hers in a 
manner perfectly maddening. Then she 
could card and spin and weave, and her nimble 
fingers made up many a suit of homespun 
and plaid cotton for the negroes. With these 
she was a great favorite, and " Miss Lucy 
says so," or " Miss Lucy won't like," was 
conclusive. 

In this list of domestic accomplishments 
it would be scandalous to omit one upon which 
the lady prided herself not a little. She was 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 15 

mistress of the great art of providing savory 
viands for the delectation of the appetite; not 
only the delicate dishes I shall not rashly 
undertake to name, but also the wholesome 
sturdy staves of life, so to speak, that fill the 
body comfortably. In the matter of coffee 
she was just perfect. Once try it, and for- 
swear all weak decoctions of inferior artists, 
lest memory lose the flavor from the palate. 
The black cook pretended to explain it in the 
phrase, '* You can't make Miss Lucy skimpy* 
to de coffee mill," but I think she failed. 
The little maid became a domestic witch 
around the coffee boiler, and seemed to infuse 
some of her own spicy freshness into the 
beverage. 

She was also intensely and fearfully medical, 
but an all-wise Providence had tempered her 
rashness with a strong faith in homoeopathy 
and little pills. Added to this, however, was 
an abiding confidence, in all acute cases, in 
calomel and quinine; which last she pro- 
nounced kee-neen, as was her duty to her 
preceptors. It was medicine to a sick man 
just to see that brisk little figure step in, draw 
together the arched brows, as if they had 
been called into the consultation, and so pop 
a little pellet on the furred tongue, and depart, 
leaving many injunctions against coffee, tea, 
spices, and the like. 

*Skimpy, equivalent to scanty and stingy; the radical meaning 
of both words entering into the signification of the provincialism. 



16 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

In the matter of religious instruction, no 
theologian of the new or old school could 
rival her. To see her at the cabins of a Sun- 
day morning with Aunt Sarah, Aunt Lucy, 
and the cloud of monkey-like little blacks, 
with the Big Book before her, was a text, ay, 
and a sermon, of itself. She would read in a 
clear, fresh voice, with slight inflections of 
boarding-school taste, that could not spoil 
it, the parables of our Lord. Her own nature 
so loved his sweet humanities, she mostly 
fell upon those that revealed his sympathies 
with childhood and youth; and The Feast at 
Cana, The Prodigal Son, The Raising of 
Jairus's Daughter, came round very often 
in her loving pictures of a Saviour. Hearing 
these simple lectures, in that wise, childlike 
voice you would agree with Uncle Ben, as 
he stood listening at his cabin door, to the 
holiness within, '' She's an angel of de 
Lord," said Ben, throwing up a black, brawny 
arm as he spoke, — " she's an angel of de 
Lord; dat jes what she is." Some months 
later he added, in his rough way, words she 
had read, " When I forgits her, may dis right 
hand forgit his cunnin', and de tongue cleave 
to de roof of my mouf." But he did forget 
her for all that. Do not let us condemn him. 
The charity his little teacher taught was 
ample to cover this. 

When the long political differences cul- 
minated in action, our little heroine found 
the opinions crystallized into a common senti- 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 17 

ment, and she shared and sympathized with 
it in every fiber of her earnest, positive being. 
She was a very resolute, active Httle rebel 
indeed, and thought her thought and spoke 
her speech without the least awe of the Great 
Giant hid in the gloom. It was her duty, she 
believed, and she went into Rebellion just as 
briskly and resolutely as she went into other 
duties, associating them with her faith and 
religion. 

She liked a good many things, however, 
besides duty. She liked a nice pony to ride, 
and a nice beau to ride with her; she liked 
a flower garden, and to dibble a little in it 
every morning; she liked pretty curtains to her 
room, pretty dresses, pretty and pleasant 
companions about her when she could get 
them; and then she would rob the pickle jar, 
and sit with such boon companions in frightful 
cucumber dissipation till ever so much o'clock. 
She liked to have the biddable young men of 
the county around her, and to please them, 
and, yes, she did like to nibble sugar biscuit 
and sweet cakes, behind the cupboard door, 
between meals. 

The beaux came, in spite of these notorious 
faults in our heroine. Gay fellows from the 
city, in gray oval hats, and stark riders from 
the plantations, in broad felt, hung their 
tiles on the hall rack, beside the ridiculous 
rims of suitors from the far North. But 
come as they might, and roofed in as they 
Uiight, they had a pleasant visit till the end^ 



18 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

and went to come no more. Yes, for if Lucy 
was not in love, she had at least taken a 
strange inclination that way. 

This was to a neighbor, the only son of his 
mother, and she a widow. His paternal 
farm adjoined Lucy's greater possessions, 
and the two had grown up together. His 
father had been a man of promise in the neigh- 
borhood, and was once chosen to the State 
Legislature. He thought it an honor, but 
it was his ruin. It spoiled him as a planter, 
and he fell into the hands of the country store- 
keeper. This is the veritable dragon of the 
small planter, which no Saint George has yet 
overcome. Cotton, like other monarchs, 
favors those only who see much of him. The 
man of a hundred bales ships to his factor, 
and receives the return less a moderate com- 
mission. The great busy world watches over 
his interest; rival looms bid for the staple, 
rival factors keep down the commission, but 
the world's huge spectacles cannot see mi- 
croscopic crops, and the dragon eats up the 
small planter. The crop is hypothecated 
to the country merchant as soon as it is in the 
ground. He will supply necessaries on no 
other terms, for the dragons are pawnbrokers 
to a man. The planter has no individual 
credit, and the crop so pawned is paid for at 
a price set by the country merchant, in goods 
on which he sets his own price. 

The father of Lucy's lover got in this mill 
of the country merchants, and it ground him 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 19 

exceeding fine indeed. He fell into low 
ways and hung about the village cotton gin, 
blacksmith shop, and hideous country store 
with its dilute alcohol, and one day he was 
taken home starting and trembling in a sad 
way. He recovered a little before he died, 
and made a will, leaving all he to had his 
wife, and afterwards to his son; or, in the 
event of his son's death, to his nephew, a 
poor lame man of the neighborhood. Then 
urging that son to avoid his errors, he made 
his peace with God, and rested. 

This advice the son was like to follow. He 
had taught school at seventeen, and farmed 
a little and traded a little, till he had a small 
capital of his own at his father's death. With 
this he paid off immediate encumbrances, 
and by economy was slowly escaping the 
dragon's fangs, when the war came between 
his work and his love for his pretty neighbor, 
Lucy Lanfranc. 



CHAPTER II 

THE fall of Sumter committed the South 
irrevocably to the struggle. The suc- 
cess, the singular escape from the 
effusion of blood, seemed to foreshow a bril- 
liant victory and bloodless independence. It 
stirred the gay and gallant spirits of the neigh- 
borhood; a company was raised, and Lucy 
made a little speech and presented a flag; 
and the captain made his little speech; his 
two little speeches, in fact, and didn't seem 
satisfied, altogether, with their effect. But 
he went his way as others before him, and 
after. 

Then Manassas followed, and the enthu- 
siasm became furious. The cry was, " The 
Yankees will be whipped before we can get 
there"; and the leopards scented blood and 
were eager to be off. A regiment was raised, 
one of Lucy's favorites was the colonel, and 
then came the speeches. Lucy, presenting the 
flag, was charming and eloquent, and gave no 
symptom of breaking down; but the colonel 
did break down woefully, both in private and 
in public, and so followed the captain. 

In none of these gayeties and gallantries 
did the widow's son take part. The fife and 
drum and the barbecue and picnic rejoiced 
in the grand Southern woods, as merry as if 

20 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 21 

behind the day and balmy night the long 
ranks of the to-morrows did not march in 
Confederate gray and Union blue; but these 
allured him in vain. Lucy was vexed and 
uneasy. Could he tarry.? The war would 
be over, and all the glory harvested, and this 
preux chevalier of hers not be even at the 
gleaning. She made up her mind to do some- 
thing, and did it. 

She lured him at the village church, and 
bore him captive. It was very sweet, she 
felt, after all, to have this recreant knight at 
her bridle-rein; but duty was duty, and she 
would have her word, cost what it may. 

He explained, frankly enough, that, knowing 
her heart was in this cause, and not seeing his 
way clear to go, he had refrained from visiting 
her. 

"But why.?" she asked; ''is it not your 
country ? Even Moses, when the Lord was 
angry with the Jews, chose to be blotted out 
of His book rather than desert his country- 
men." 

" Yes," said Victor Shandy, " but a later 
apostle, under a better dispensation, said 
that * he who does not provide for his own 
household is worse than a heathen.' My 
mother's affairs are so embarrassed, I cannot 
afford to leave her to struggle alone." 

That was all he said. She understood now 
how this man w ho stayed was braver than all 
who had gone. He had sacrificed his am- 
bition, his eager desire to be well with men,. 



m SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

and risked even her love, upon the altar of 
fihal affection. '' I didn't know; I didn't 
think," she said; ''but I — Couldn't I take 
care of your mother ? " 

It was enough, and although she protested 
that he and his mother were different persons, 
and she had never offered to take care of 
him, yet it was somehow arranged that way, 
and there was a quiet wedding soon after. 
We can suppose Victor Shandy allowed his 
wife to assist him in the matter of his mother's 
embarrassments, for he went soon after to 
the wars. 

The little wife remained quietly at her 
home, busy with her household duties, for 
perhaps a year. One morning, however, 
she lost her head man, her overseer, a canny 
Scot. '* He could na just see his way," he 
said, '' to bide at hame when sae mony braw 
men were i' th' field. His conscience gied 
him sair twinges there anent, and the slave 
boddies were a' gude laddies; belike the lady 
could sted the place alane." So Lucy praised 
his resolution, and was left her own overseer 
and manager. 

How did she get on.^ Let her speak for 
herself. She wrote many letters to her soldier 
husband, in those days, — odd mixtures of 
practical sense, unpractical advice, and pious 
exhortations. Some of them are preserved, 
and we quote extracts. 

** I am no end of a planter," she said. 
*' Up by day, I breakfast at sunrise, and 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 23 

mount Kitty Clyde for a morning ride over the 
fields where the men are at work. This 
keeps me till ten o'clock. Then for domestic 
duties until the afternoon, when I go again 
to look at the work and see that it is done 
right. . . . That unlucky south field wanted 
manure. Of course fertilizers were impossi- 
ble, the blockade is so bad. But I ground 
the cottonseed to a meal, and put it on, a 
thousand pounds to the acre, and vegetation 
comes out wonderfully. The stock eat the 
meal, but it is not good, because it spoils the 
milk, unless you mix other things with it. . . . 
Your little wife has become a great spinster. 
Jane and Lucy and I carded, spun, and wove, 
not only stuffs for the hands, but heaps beside. 
The blockade is so bad, as I said, and the poor 
people just starving and in rags. McCand- 
less, at the store, is so hard, I just thought I 
would try a little plan. I sold the soldiers' 
wives the cloth very cheap. Why not give ? 
Oh, that is so like a silly man! Because I 
took the little money, and Mr. Melden, the 
preacher, who is a very good man, and not at 
all like the last you disliked so much, and — 
Oh, yes! Mr. Melden's brother got me some 
sugar, coffee, etc., for the poor people with 
the money. I declare, what a funny sentence 
that is! Never mind. You know what I 
mean, and I am in a hurry now. But Mc- 
Candless is as mad about it, you don't know; 
and the poor creatures seem to think I am 
making money at it somehow. . . . As to 



24 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

the sale of cotton, the business — I don't 
know how to spell ' business,' no more than 
I do ' receive ' and ' believe,' or which letter is 
first. So I crook the ' s ' just the least little 
bit, and the ' i ' the least little bit, and put the 
dot above the middle of them. If you don't 
fix it right, it is your bad spelling, not mine." 

Then she instructed him about the care of 
his health, in which, we may know, the 
quinine and little pills were not forgotten. 
*' I know," she said, " that soldiers must get 
wet; but whenever you do, as soon as you get 
to your tent, change everything to the skin, 
and have Floyd rub you hard with a coarse 
dry towel. Don't neglect this." She was glad 
to hear " he had been promoted for gallantry, 
and was a sergeant " ; then she closed in 
simple expressions of love and prayers, so 
dear to the yearning absent. 

At rare intervals letters came from him. 
Sometimes a batch, and then one or two 
stragglers, and then silence till the next op- 
portunity. The mail facilities ( ?) in the Con- 
federacy were a ridiculous failure at the best. 
Once old Mr. Sambre, a neighbor, found her 
frowning over a piece of information in one 
of these letters. He was a licensed grumbler,, 
and went on, as usual, this morning till he 
attracted her attention. 

" I am afraid," said he, hitching his dis- 
content to some disconnected remarks, — 
" I am afraid we have not gained much by 
this cruel Rebellion." 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 25 

At another time she would have rebuked the 
expression and argued the point; but she had 
her own private wrong to brood over. " This 
cruel Rebellion," he continued. " We are 
taxed this side and t'other. We didn't usen 
to have it, and hadn't ought to now. Now 
the government," with a stress on the last 
syllable, " is a goin' for to take our cotton, 
callin' of it a loan. Loan indeed! it's mighty 
like old-fashioned stealin'. I heered say this 
is the rich man's war, an' the poor man's 
fight. It's a sight wuss. It's the poor man's 
pay, too." 

" Mr. Sambre," said Lucy, rallying, " sup- 
pose you were to ask Mr. McCandless, down 
at the store, to buy you a certain article in 
New Orleans, and he did so, but the bill he 
presented for the goods was larger than you 
expected; would you refuse to pay ? " 

'' That I would," said he, triumphantly. 
" I tell you. Miss Lanfranc, — Mrs. Shandy, 
I mean, — I wouldn't trust that thar Mc- 
Candless furder'n you could throw a bull 
by the tail." 

'' But," said Lucy, trying to save her illus- 
tration, '' if McCandless was an honest man, 
wouldn't you pay ? " 

'' I dunno; more'n likely I'd have to. But," 
he added stoutly, '* I'd grumble hke the devil." 

'* Well, well," said Lucy, '' we'll just have 
to let you and such as you grumble and pay." 

*' But I want to be gittin' what I done 
told McCandless to git. He may have 



26 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

went* and spent it for somethin' else, like that 
dern lickin' our government's done got up in 
Kantuek," growled the irrepressible. 

*' What do you mean ? " said Lucy. " Have 
you any late news ? " 

" You done heered how Zollieoffer's got 
licked, an' we got licked at Donelson, and 
somebody's done got licked som'er's else I 
dunno whar. They ain't none of 'em wuth 
a cuss, them ginirals. Ginral Jackson'd tie 
the whole of 'em up in a bag and lick the hind- 
sights off 'n 'em. They don't put up the right 
min as officers; that's what's the matter," 
said the old man. 

" I do not doubt you are right," said Lucy. 
" Would you believe it, there is my husband, 
Victor Shandy, only a sergeant.? I don't 
know what that is, but it is neither suited to 
his position in society, nor abilities." And 
she believed this neglect was fruitful of all the 
disasters. 

'* A sergeant, more partickler, a ordurely 
sergeant," replied the old man, with a Southern 
softening of the vowel, " ain't bad. I was a 
ordurely sergeant myself once 't at the mus- 

But Lucy did not hear him. She had gone 
to order the pony carriage, for a visit to the 
post office, and was soon on her way. 

The storekeeper was lounging with the cus- 

*Iii the South, the lower classes have no use for the participle 
" gone " except as an auxiliary in such a string of pearls as 
" done been gone done it." *' Might have went " is the common 
expression. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 27 

tomary idlers of such a place when she 
entered, and he showed his insolent dislike 
by the tardiness of his answer to her call. 

" My mail," said she, impatiently. 

He lounged over the counter, reaching one 
arm blindly to the letter boxes as he spoke. 

" And so Sandy's lef you, ma'am." 

" My mail," she said. 

" Sandy was a forehanded man with craps. 
It's moighty tight ye bin wid him, when you 
drav him aff," said he, with familiar im- 
pertinence. 

" Sandy is a true man," said Lucy, 
flushing. " He went to share the dangers, as 
he shared the bread of his people. He would 
have scorned to make a profit out of their 
hardships. It is more than you can say of 
yourself, I fear, Mr. McCandless." 

It provoked the wretch to a last piece of 
cruel impertinence. " Sure an' ye didn't 
see your husband's cousin, Misther John 
Shandy, as is come to take possission av the 
estate, now poor Vicky's dead." 

" You lie, McCandless," said a mild voice 
at variance with the words; '' but, ma'am, 
I am your husband's cousin." 

She turned, and saw a small man with one 
leg much distorted, that rested on a crutch. 
He was sallow and homely, quite a common- 
looking man, but the face, Lucy thought, was 
not a bad face, as he stood looking straight 
at her. 



^8 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

" I have heard my husband speak of you,** 
she said. " What does this man mean ? " 

" Never mind his meaning," said he. 
" What he says of Victor, as well as of me, 
is, no doubt, false. If you will bring your 
mail into Mrs. McCandless's sitting-room I 
will explain." 

He asked her, when they were seated, if 
her mail contained any letter from her hus- 
band; and, being answered in the negative, 
he explained that there had been a great battle 
at Shiloh, near Pittsburg Landing, by which 
the enemy's advance was checked, but at the 
expense of a heavy loss in officers and men. 
A partial list of the casualties had been pub- 
lished, and Victor's name was not included 
in it; and he showed her the paper. " I am 
very thankful," said she, " both for the victory, 
and that my husband has been spared. What, 
then, did that man mean ? " 

** Oh, nothing," said he; '' only it had been 
suggested that one name, ' W. Sanders, ser- 
geant,' might be a misprint for ' V. Shandy,' 
as the former name was not remembered 
among the roll of the company that was 
familiar to the neighborhood." 

*' It is true, Victor is a sergeant," said the 
wife. 

'' Very true; but such a mistake is not 
probable. Sanders is a common name; the 
regiment has been out eighteen months or 
more, and has doubtless recruited much. I 
would be willing to bet," said he, " that it has. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 29 

picked up half a dozen Sanders in that time, 
and this poor fellow is one of them. It would 
be a very morbid feeling, ma'am, from the 
very list that assures you that your husband 
is not hurt, to infer that he actually has been 
killed." 

In this way, reasoning and explaining, he 
assured the wife, till she was happy. 

" Come," said she, " you must go with me 
to ' The Bucks,' and explain this to his 
mother as kindly as you have to me, and then 
dine with me at Malvoisee. Victor used to 
talk a great deal of you, and I almost seem to 
know you well." 



CHAPTER III 

AS the two, Lucy and her cousin, came 
through the shop, McCandless half 
lounged over the counter, and leered, 
mocking, at the contrasted couple; she was so 
straight, slender, and graceful; and he so 
deformed and ungainly, as he labored and 
rattled on his crutch at her side. 

*' A purty sight to see pride have a fall, 
and fast Lou Longfrank with no beau but a 
damn lame fiddler," said the storekeeper, 
as they passed out to the carriage. It was 
gross and offensive. John Shandy, after 
assisting his cousin into her carriage, had 
turned, when she spoke. 

'' Come in," she said; '' you are to go with 
me to ma, you know. Never mind that 
wretch. La! do you think I would break 
my parasol at Mrs. McCandless's poodle, — 
it is an ugly little vermin, and so is he, — be- 
cause it barks at me ? Remember Dr. Watts's 
* Let dogs delight to bark and bite: 
It is their nature to.' " 

'' And — and," hesitated he, '' these poor 
limbs were never made to tear his eyes, but 
I think my heart is ready to wish it." 

" Oh, yes, come on; and we'll wish him all 
to pieces, if you like! No harm in that, I 
hope. But seeing ma is the first thing." 

30 



SPIRIT OP THE SOUTH 31 

" Yes," said he, following; " that is first. 
We will go." And he followed her. The 
subject was not immediately dropped after 
they drove off, and he, hesitatingly, referred 
to his lameness, upon which McCandless 
had presumed. 

'' Very Hke," said she; " I didn't think of 
that." And the remark soothed and pleased 
him. 

One of the most painful reflections to the 
deformed must be the thought that their defect 
is in the mind of others with them; and so 
Lucy's casual rejoinder was pleasant to him. 

In the store, old Mr. Sambre, who had 
followed Lucy to the post oflice, spoke a word 
of caution. 

" Now you've done been gone done 

" Done what ? " said McCandless. 

" Jist sowed a crap o' hell-fire in the best 

sile in County, I reckon," replied the 

old man. 

" What, that gal ? Divil a bit do I care," 
said McCandless. 

" Mebbe not," said the other; " but 'tain't 
the gal this time. Them Shandys is gun- 
powder. Mighty cool and shiny ef you let 
'em alone, but a spark sets 'em all off." 

''What, the lame fiddler.? I'd straighten 
his cruked leg aisier than moy little finger," 
said the storekeeper, contemptuously. 

" Yes, an' git a mahogany bedstead in a 
doing of it," said Sambre. And with this 



3^ SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

figurative description of our last narrow 
couch, the conversation closed. 

But John Shandy did not dine at Malvoisee 
that day. He went to his humble apart- 
ments, and, after writing some letters, he sat 
and thought. That day a lady had been 
grossly insulted in his presence and through 
him, and he had suffered the insult to pass 
unrebuked. He wished now he had spoken 
in reply; the matter might have ended in words, 
but it was too late for that. It was hard that 
this should come upon him. He had never 
felt his physical defects so keenly. His life, 
as he reviewed it, had been one of trial, but 
nothing like this. His new cousin was so 
kind to him, and her cool, fresh voice like 
water brooks in a dry and thirsty land. 
Others of her sex had been kind ; they were all 
kind in their way; but the way was out of 
pity for his lameness, and because he was 
something different and less than other men. 
Lucy had been kind, forgetful of his physical 
defects, and because she seemed to regard him 
as one different and better than his kind; 
something near to herself, and to be cherished 
accordingly. And this one woman of all the 
world had been repeatedly, and at last brutally, 
insulted in his presence, and by a reflection 
that aspersed his manhood. 

He took a pistol from his trunk, cleaned and 
oiled it, and then reloaded it carefully, after 
trying the lock. He then sent out and got a 
bottle of liquor, of which he drank once, as a 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 33 

feverish man drinks water. He then dressed 
himself with great care, and sat down to think. 
His thoughts were very, very painful, for he 
soon lay on the bed crying like a child; but 
he arose afterwards, resolved. 

He was about to leave the room, when his 
violin case caught his eye. He turned back, 
and taking the instrument tenderly as if he 
loved it, he began to play. An inspiration, 
such as musicians will recognize as coming 
strangely at times, was upon him, and the 
strings yielded a soft, bugle-like melody, so 
low and sweet, to his wish. Dear old farewell 
airs, suggested less, he thought, by himself 
than the violin, came marvelously to him, 
though he had not played them before for 
years. The music wailed and sobbed, and 
clung like a child to the bow and strings, as if 
loath to part. He heard the whispering 
voices of little children at the door, listening 
to the low, charmed melody, and he remem- 
bered his own sad, solitary childhood. Then 
the tender violin seemed to whisper rebukingly 
its early love and companionship. Yes, it 
had been his only friend, his only adviser, his 
only comforter. He remembered when his 
small hand could scarcely enclose the neck and 
finger the strings, and how he had struggled 
and toiled to learn that mysterious language, 
the melodious tongue spoken in the violin. 
He had learned it; and he and the old violin, 
growing sweeter in companionship as the 
years rolled on, had talked many whispered 



34 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

secrets together, in the sweet, sad times. But 
it would never be so again; and the violin 
wailed its sorrow with unspeakable tenderness. 
He tried again and again to put it down, but 
again and again the pleading old love con- 
quered, in increasing melody. But it must be 
done. This violin was to him a pure, angelic 
spirit. It was the voice of innocence out of 
the heavens, enclosed in the dry wood and 
tender strings. He might do what he was 
resolved to do, what he knew he had to do, 
but he could not return and lay his stained 
hand upon his violin again. 

It was with a great effort he ceased, and, 
beginning at the treble, turned and stretched 
each string till it snapped with ringing jar; 
and, laying the violin in its case, like a poor 
babe in its little coffin, he burst into a passion 
of tears. All was over. All ties to the past 
were broken with the sweet strings, and the 
future purpose was fixed. He gave a lingering 
look at the room and its furniture. He felt 
that, though he should see it a thousand times 
hereafter, it would never again look to him 
as now; never as it had looked to him in the 
past. His life there had not been happy, 
but it made him inexpressibly sad to know 
that he was parting with that life for- 
ever. 

Strange to say, in all these meditations over 
what he was resolved to do, and its conse- 
quences, no thought of danger to himself had 
occurred to him. Weak, deformed, and un- 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 35 

used to events requiring prompt and decisive 
action, and with an impossibly chivalrous 
conduct for his guidance, planned beforehand, 
the thought of any fatal result to himself never 
crossed his mind. Under these influences, 
therefore, he paused once more, pistol in 
hand, at the door, and looked back. It was 
John Shandy's farewell to his old life. 

He crossed the street, walking straight to 
McCandless's door. The bully stood on the 
stoop, but turned hastily and went in, as he 
saw the lame man, and passed round the 
counter to his desk. By it stood his double- 
barreled gun, heavily loaded. His hand was 
on it, but Shandy spoke: '' You scoundrel, do 
you insult a lady ? " And the pistol cracked, 
McCandless dropped, and a crowd rushed 
around. John Shandy surrendered, and was 
held in custody, waiting the result of the 
wound, reported critical and very dangerous. 

In the mean while, Lucy, unconscious of 
the desperate resolution taken by the lame 
man, thought only of his kindness to her. 
" Just like Victor," she said to herself, '' and 
his voice is like Victor's; just that pitch of 
pliant, watchful tenderness, as if it had been 
schooled in soothing little children, and yet 
the words so calm, wise, and firm, so cool and 
reasonable. It would have been hard to 
receive the mean stab of that wretch Mc- 
Candless, had not he been there." And then 
she thought indignantly of the offensive man- 
ner and last studied insult of the storekeeper, 



36 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

and, clinching her Httle hands, she thought 
of her absent protector. 

Then, at the moment, she heard the news 
that she was avenged. It shocked her. It 
seemed as if some evil power had granted the 
last wicked wish in her mind; and then she 
thought of her avenger less kindly than before 
he did this deed, or than if it had been undone. 
Still she thought of him, and remembered that 
duty, perhaps, required something of her. 
She went to her mother, Mrs. Shandy, and the 
two visited the prisoner. 

As McCandless recovered, Shandy was 
admitted to bail, on the bond of his aunt and 
cousin, and was free, but not the same man as 
before. He had received a great shock and 
kept aloof more than ever. When his cousin 
•^aw it, she endeavored to comfort and 
cheer him, but he remained silent and 
depressed. 

But a sorrow was coming to his comforter. 
John Shandy one day recognized an old school- 
mate in a disabled soldier, and inquired the 
news. 

'' Nothing since Shiloh," said he. *' I sup- 
pose you heard of your cousin Victor's death. 
Poor fellow! he got his lieutenancy the day 
before he fell." 

*' Victor dead! I will not believe it," said 
John Shandy. / 

" He's dead, all the same. I saw him. We 
fell together. I left this other fellow," pointing 
to his leg, " and poor Vic got a charge o' 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 37 

grape right here," pointing to his breast, said 
the soldier. 

*' Was he killed instantly ? " asked Shandy. 

'' Well, no; we fell near together, I said. 
He sent some words of love and that sort of 
thing to his wife, and then went off. Indeed, 
I can't say I saw him die, exactly, for this 
cursed bone was grinding me, and I sort o' 
fainted; but that was the last o' him," was the 
reply. 

" Poor Vic! and have you told his wife.? " 
said Shandy. 

" Ne'er a time, at least not yet; want you 
to go 'long and sort o' reinforce me. It's a 
bad job," said the other. 

" No," said John, " you must go. It 
is better. She has been very good to me, and 
it will break her heart. I may see aunt, and 
break it to her. That is bad enough." 

Poor Lucy! To lose the beloved in the 
waning years is hard; but then the comfort is in 
the brief separation. One has only gone 
before to prepare a place for the other that 
will soon come. But to lose such in the green 
and bourgeon of wedded life is the fulness 
of woe. She thought of her youth and vigor 
pityingly, as another might lament old age 
and feebleness. It must be so long, so long 
before she saw him again. But yesterday, she 
vainly thought, she was living for him, and all 
she did was for him; but now, her work was 
done ! If it only could be for an instant; if she 
could only close his eyes, and perform the last 



38 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

offices of love for him, that would be sweet; 
but she could do nothing for him any more. 
It was all done now, and ended. 

Yesterday, and for him, she loved this life 
with its hardships and trials, for it was Victor's 
life. She had loved to adorn her person and 
cherish it for his sake. Now it wearied her. 
This corporeal frame had been her servant, 
to do her will, to please her husband. She 
had loved its beauty, and cherished and culti- 
vated its endowments, for his sake. Now 
this servant had become her terrible master. 
It willed for her to live, and she lived. It 
willed for her to toil and suffer, and she 
toiled and suffered unrewarded. Nothing 
she did was for herself; nothing she ever did 
hereafter could be for herself; all was for this 
stern, relentless body. It made her live, 
when she would be away and at rest. It made 
her toil and plan and suffer; it hungered and 
thirsted; it froze and burned; it was never 
satisfied. She came to think of it as her 
deadly enemy; cruel, relentless, and perse- 
cuting, fastened upon her by chains she dared 
not break. She prayed to be released from it; 
prayed also, poor child, that she might be able 
to see God's love still shining from His cross. 
We will not doubt the Comforter came. 

A second sorrow, for a time, did her good, 
in raising her out of the selfishness of grief. 
Poor Mrs. Shandy, Victor's mother, did not 
long survive the shock of her son's death. 
She lived to bless her daughter and her 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 39 

nephew, at her bedside, and, smiling recogni- 
tion of the loved in heaven, she passed away 
and was at peace. 

After his aunt's funeral, John Shandy, 
oppressed with his own sorrows, and driven 
by the sordid cares of earning a hard living, 
kept away from the widow, his cousin. She 
had borne up well in the care of her mother- 
in law, and John Shandy was unaware of the 
extent of her dejection. He chanced, how- 
ever, to meet the village physician, and 
learned with a shock of her condition. 

" Does she talk much," at last Shandy 
asked, " I mean about Victor ? " 

"Victor.? oh! ah! yes! No, that topic 
is forbidden. It is dwelling upon that which 
saps her vital energies. Possibly we cannot 
minister to a mind diseased; but avoiding 
injurious topics, we can afford the light, 
cheerful food of gossip, the news of the day, 
and so enable the mind to achieve its own 
cure." 

'' Throw physic to the dogs," muttered 
John Shandy, as he thought of the doctors 
talking gossip and twaddle to such a patient, 
and he hobbled off. 

Black Lucy,* the maid of the poor little 

*It was amusing, on a large plantation, to observe the curious 
cognomens arising from the habit of the negroes of naming their 
offspring after a favorite in the planter's family. There would 
be, for. example, a " Black Lucy," " Yellow Lucy," " Jane 
Lucy," " Sarah's Lucy," and so ad infinitum. But this was 
more amusing when a " Little Jim " stood before you, six feet 
and over, and heavy in proportion. 



40 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

widow, admitted him. '' How is your mis- 
tress ? " asked John Shandy. 

" Lord! Mass John, she's jis a peekin' 
and a pinin' away; dat she is! " answered the 
maid. 

" Does she talk much about her husband .? " 
he asked. 

'* 'Bout Mass Vic; bress de Lord, no! 
Doctor done said not. She jis lay on de bed 
alookin' and alookin' at Mass Vic's picter 
oba de mankel-shel all de time "; and so 
leading to the sitting-room, she announced, 
" Mass John done come." 

Lucy was lying on a little sociable, or sofa, 
as he entered. She rose to meet him, and 
spoke indifferent words of welcome. She had 
thought of John Shandy, in an idle way, in 
her grief, even wondering that, as her hus- 
band's nearest relative, he had not come to 
her. With the curious selfishness of sorrow, 
she had even taken a little comfort in the 
thought that he had deserted her. Grief 
does so like to multiply and isolate itself 
sometimes. But now he had come and was 
welcome. 

He gradually and easily led the conversation 
to Victor Shandy, bringing up reminiscences of 
his school days and his generosity and kind- 
ness. Then he told of his earlier manhood and 
struggles, and how bravely he had faced mis- 
fortune and borne it down. He spoke of his 
love for his mother, and finally of his love and 
devotion to Lucy. Her memory and her love 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 41 

responded in the story of his enHstment, and 
of his generous love. So the two twined 
threads of tender recollection around the gal- 
lantry and gentleness of the dead; and when 
the thought of the noble close of that brief 
precious life was reached, Lucy could whisper 
of it, 

" It is not all of life to live, 
Nor all of death to die." 

She realized how rich she was in having won 
so precious a love, and worn it, and she was 
comforted. When John Shandy arose to go 
she thanked him, expressing her gratitude in 
few and simple words. She asked him to 
remain, at least a few days, and act for her 
on the farm. He consented, and finally it was 
settled that he was to live at " The Bucks," 
which place, Lucy, backed by her lawyer, 
declared to be his. On this point he resisted, 
but Victor's death preceding his mother's, 
the estate had never vested in Victor, but had 
gone directly to John Shandy. So John 
Shandy took *' The Bucks," and assisted in 
the management of both places. 



CHAPTER IV 

A YEAR with its alleviations passed 
slowly over the two in their new rela- 
tions, adjusting them in their habits 
and peculiarities, each to the other. The 
widow felt that John Shandy's presence was 
under the providential will of Him who cares 
for the widow; and John Shandy acknowl- 
edged a growth and purpose in life that made 
it valuable. A very dear secret had formed 
itself slowly in his heart, and diffused its 
delicious poison over the feeble frame of the 
lame man; but he never spoke of it or hinted 
it to a creature in the world, not even to the 
long-neglected violin. If it was known at all, 
it was marred; if it was told to one other, it 
was converted into a pain. It was his own 
and only his, and of its existence the widow 
was as unconscious as are the living of the 
good angels guarding them. 

One morning these two were in consultation, 
when Black Lucy announced in customary 
phrase, '* Miss Lucy, de sogeas done come." 

It proved to be an agent of the Confederate 
government, levying the cotton loan. When 
Lucy understood, she said, " Mr. Shandy will 
wait upon you; take what you please, or all, 
if you please, and God prosper the cause 
that has the widow's offering." 

42 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 43 

Others were not so liberal. McCandless, 
defeated in the prosecution of John Shandy, 
had gone on prospering in other affairs, as 
such men did during the war. He now owned 
one or two large plantations, and had a large 
stock of cotton on hand, collected in his 
business. He tried various artifices to escape 
the levy, but to no purpose. 

" I am a subject of Quane Victory's," said 
he,^as if the name of that mighty potentate 
was enough. 

" Confound ' Quane Victory,' she's been a 
little too much on the other side. We don't 
want you, but the cotton." And the cotton 
he would have; and it was duly taken and 
placed under a small guard for removal the 
following week. 

McCandless, however, did not give up so 
readily. It is supposed, from events, that he 
betrayed the seizure to the Federal forces 
hovering near, and also that he sought, at 
the same time, other revenges on those he 
hated. 

A few nights later Lucy was wakened by 
a loud knocking, and Lucy, her maid, entered 
and said, " Bress de Lord, miss, de Yankees 
done come." These were visitors that would 
not take denial. She rose and went to the 
small drawing-room. A soldier in blue en- 
tered and bowed, speaking at once, coldly and 
clearly : " My name is E — — . I am an 
officer in the Union Army, detailed to protect 
the seizure of certain confiscated cotton on 



44 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

your premises. I have taken your teams, and 
employed your farm hands in its removal. 
It is also my painful duty to arrest one John 
Shandy, a Rebel spy, harbored or concealed 
about these premises." 

" Did you arouse me, sir, to tell me you had 
robbed me of my cotton, stock, and slaves, 
and intended to murder my cousin ? " said the 
widow, coldly. 

" I waked you to let you know my duty so 
far as it affected you. Deliver up the spy, 
and it may be in your favor at headquarters," 
said he. 

" I reject your bribe; do your worst," said 
she, stoutly. 

The officer turned to the maid, that stood 
looking ashy pale at the scene. " Where is 
John Shandy ? "he asked, sharply. 

" Don't you tell," said Lucy to her. 

" Lord, miss, how'd I know, ef he ain't 
down at De Bucks," stammered the maid. 

*' We will find him," said the officer; and, as 
Lucy prayerfully hoped he would not, she 
heard the threats of the soldiery, as they 
searched, to hang her cousin at her door porch. 
She would have spoken again bitterly, but 
just then, rising over the tramp of feet and 
the shouting, she heard the musical droll of a 
fiddle, and an irresistibly comical voice sing- 
ing,— 

" He who hath any peanuts 

And giveth his neighbor none, 

Sha' n't have none o' my peanuts 

When his peanuts are gone." 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 45 

And the violin drolly re-echoed " pea-ea-ea- 
nuts," in mocking treble. The house shook 
with the shouts and laughter of the delighted 
soldiery. As the violinist entered the room 
his instrument concluded with the long yawn 
and dissatisfied growl of a person newly 
aroused. 

" Humph! " said the officer, trying to appear 
grave amid the clamor, and looking at the 
player's feet. " We have got the devil here, 
hoofs and all; who else are you, sir? Come, 
you seem to be a jolly dog. What's this 
McCandless has told about you ? You don't 
look like a dangerous spy, at all events," 
said the officer. 

An explanation followed; and the officer 
remained for some time, and John Shandy 
touched his violin in a different strain. Such 
sweet old airs as " Bonnie Doon," the " Braes 
of Balquhidder," '' Dumbarton's Belle," and 
" Annie Laurie," softened the heart towards 
the singer. " Let me speak to Mrs. Shandy 
a moment," said the officer; and, when Shandy 
had left the room, he added, *' This is a bad 
business. I don't like it. It will not hurt 
Shandy. I will take care of that, but it 
will cost him some trouble. Of course, I 
must put him in custody as soon as he 
returns." 

Lucy smiled and said nothing; but I think 
she and the Federal soldier had one thought 
in common, — that John Shandy would not 
fall in the way again that night. 



46 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

; It vexed her, therefore, to meet her cousin, 
after the officer had gone out. " What are you 
doing here ? " she said. " Why don't you go .P" 

He repKed, '' Go! where am I to go.^ I 
heard, down in the village, of your danger, and 
I came. I must stay till it is over." He did 
stay, but the party left without seeing him 
again. Perhaps purposely. 

She censured his rashness the next morning, 
and more when she understood that he had 
information at the time of bribes and whiskey 
given by McCandless to the men, to inflame 
them to execute him at her door. " You 
might have been killed, and what could I do 
without you ? " she said, piteously. 

The words thrilled him inexpressibly. Nor 
was his devotion lost upon Lucy. He was so 
brave, so rash, and yet so ready in resource; 
his violin, so long neglected, had doubtless 
saved him. But there were other matters to 
demand attention. 

It was found, the next morning, that a great 
part of the able-bodied slaves had gone off 
with the Federal soldiers. Part of the teams 
were taken, but with what remained, and the 
negroes, Lucy and John Shandy thought 
they could still manage to save the crop. It 
was the first shock of the battery against the 
" peculiar institution," and it was felt severely 
there as elsewhere; the first crumbling of that 
huge fabric whose ruin crushed, for a time, 
beneath its weight, the energy and productive 
wealth of the South. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 47 

But the disorder among the slaves was not 
the only evil of this period. A bandit of the 
neighborhood had spread a terror that the 
false security of a home-guard company had 
increased. This holiday troop, having feasted 
and frolicked as " our defenders," and having 
been petted by the girls, who, poor creatures, 
in the absence of the real article, were fain to 
amuse themselves playing with these wooden 
soldiers, was one day bagged by the bandit, 
and ridiculously paroled " not to take up 
arms." After this, the violence and terror 
increased until John Shandy could bear it no 
more, and set out for the nearest Confederate 
military post to obtain efficient protection. 

Very many things of another character had 
occurred to try John Shandy's spirit at this 
time. While his fair mistress did not abso- 
lutely '* go into society," she began to receive 
attentions. Sturdy widowers came and talked 
crops and the difficulty of conducting a plan- 
tation without proper female guidance. Gay 
Confederate soldiers at home on leave courted 
her desperately, with professional audacity, 
for twenty-four hours on a stretch. Lucy 
would say, after such visits, how wretched she 
was, and do a sort of '' hour's penance " 
before poor Victor Shandy's picture. One 
day the maid rebuked her in this way : — 

" Why is you wretched ? You's got every- 
thing. Everybody jis say, Poor Lucy! 'cause 
Mass Vic done gone and got hisself shot, and 
dey all fusses oba you. I think I'se a heap 



48 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

wretcheder." And the maid mightily be- 
moaned herself. 

" You! " said Lucy, opening her eyes, 
'' why, what makes you wretched? " 

'' AH 'cause o' dat nigger Floyd went off 
wid Mass Vic," said the girl. 

'' Floyd! Victor's servant! Why, he is not 
killed too, is he? " asked the mistress. 

'* No, miss, and dat's jis what's de matter. 
Ef Floyd done got hisself killed, everybody'd 
say, * See dat po' brack chile ! Her beau done 
got hisself shot,' and de wimmen, and de 
brack genelem too, be a-comin' mighty sorry 
for dis po' gal. But now. Lord bress ye! 
dey say, * See dat little nigga mopin' da, jis 
'cause Mass Vic's Floyd done gone off an' lef 
her, an' got married to some white gal up 
Norf.' " And the maid sobbed with honest 
vexation. 

" You needn't fear," said Lucy, '* the 
Northern ladies are very far from marrying 
one of your color." 

*' Yes," sobbed the maid, " but dem niggas 
ses it all de same. Bet dat nigga Floyd done 
run de fus' gun," she added fiercely. 

Lucy slightly modified her conduct after 
this. She no longer received suitors as such; 
but her pastor began to be particular in his 
attentions, the gossips said. This was the 
Mr. Melden mentioned in one of Lucy's 
letters. He was a quiet, scholarly young man, 
living with his widowed mother in the village 
parsonage. He had been driven from New 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 49 

Orleans, and had found his way to this quiet 
retreat. As an accompHshed, though rather 
pedantic student, but more especially as her 
pastor, he was made welcome to Lucy's house 
and table, and many a symposium was spread 
for him. His mother sometimes accompanied 
him, and quiet tea drinkings took place, at 
which there was some serious lovemaking of a 
very proper character. 

One of these pleasant repasts was suddenly 
interrupted by a shocking occurrence of 
imminent peril to the pretty widow, as well as 
to her serious lover. They were just seated 
and the usual grace pronounced, when there 
came a violent knocking, and the maid burst 
in, pale as ashes. " Lord! miss," she screamed, 
'* dem debbils done come." 

No need of further announcement. A 
stalwart ruffian, girt with pistols, stood in the 
door.* 

*A villain capable of the acts narrated in the text operated, 
in Lower and Middle Mississippi, during the war, and actually 
captured and paroled a local guard, raised to repress his outrages. 
He was finally captured with his band by Major O. P. Preston, 
C. S. A. That gallant and wary officer avoided the imprudent 
snare furnished by the planters, which betrayed the unlucky 
local guard, by remaining in camp, steadfastly declining the 
hospitalities of the neighborhood, and pursuing the search through 
active and trusted scouts. In a few days two of these reported 
the discovery of the outlaw's retreat, in the dense thicket of a cane- 
brake, approachable by secret paths, known only to the outlaws. 
These had been discovered and threaded by the scouts, and by 
dawn, under their guidance, the Major and his men penetrated 
the secluded recesses of the jungle, and surprised the banditti, 
plunged in the lethargy sequent upon debauch. The Con- 
federate laid his hand upon the throat of their leader, Price, as he 
lay with his concubines, his adjacent arms having been removed. 
The bandit's only remark, with an oath, on discovery of the 
situation, was, " Well, by , you got me." 



50 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

" Sorry I'm so dern late; knowed I was ex- 
pected to grub too. Oh, don't mind me, I 
ain't pertickler who I eats with! Jack, 
straighten that thar fellow, he's a fallin' off'n 
his cheer." 

Mr. Melden looked scared, and drew back. 
Lucy looked cold and pale. '' What does 
this mean ? " she asked. 

''Hell!" said he, briefly; "coffee, marm, 
and git out your liquor." 

Lucy rose from the table. " Stop right 
thar; dursn't move out'n your tracks," said the 
bandit, rising. 

She attempted to escape. He caught her 
in his rude arms, and pressed her lips with 
coarse, hot kisses. '' Mr. Melden," she 
screamed, " are you a man ? " 

"I — I am a minister of the gospel. God 
alone can deliver us from this peril," said the 
startled priest. But Lucy at last broke away 
and fled. 

'* By Joe, she's a game one. Jack, lock 
that outer door. She's safe now, I reckon," 
said the ruffian. '' Gal," to the colored girl, 
'' go in to your missis, an' fix her up; she's 
goin' to git married. I've come a purpose, 
an' so's the preacher here." Then a scene 
took place between the minister and the 
bandit; the one swearing the other should 
perform a sort of ceremony over his horrid 
purpose; and the other, who had recovered 
his firmness, refusing, amid the coarse jests 
of the ruflaans, and the frantic cries and ap- 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 51 

peals of the mother. The bandit persisted, 
swearing he *' had had handmaids, like them 
patriarchs Jacob and Joseph and them," but 
now he was going to have a wife, " ef it was 
only to settle down, after fightin' and fun was 
over, and be a honest man." 

This contest gave our heroine time. At 
first she was paralyzed with terror, and her 
womanly horror of the man. 

** Lucy," she said to her maid, when she 
understood his purpose, " what shall we do ? 
We must escape from this place." 

" De Lord knows how! Dis door done 
locked; dey's all in de dinin'-room, and dey 
ain't no udder," said the scared negress. 

*' Stay," said Lucy, " the Lord will pro- 
vide." And she opened a third door, and 
went in, the maid following. 

The house was originally constructed on the 
usual plan of Southern country houses, with 
a gallery in front, on which a small room had 
been closed in. This, in her schooldays, had 
been Lucy's room; but the random addition 
of other apartments had made it superfluous 
as a chamber, and, for convenience, it had 
been converted into a clothes-room. The walls 
were hung with the garments of three genera- 
tions. Opposite the door was a huge press, 
closing the window. The shutter was closed 
without, and likely to be overlooked ; especially 
as the ruffians had complete information of the 
plan of the house and of the use to which the 
small room had been put. Lucy tore out the 



52 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

clothing, and shook the loose, thin backing 
of the press, till it fell out, to one side. There 
was no sash, and the half-rotted shutter 
yielded to a steady push. Lucy peeped out. 
A large live oak obscured the opening, and 
the figures, plainly visible by the torches that 
blinded the bearers, were distinctly to be seen. 
*' Fasten the outer and inner door, while I get 
two cloaks. Throw them out, now be quiet." 
And the two were without. 

The torches of the ruffians were an advan- 
tage. Avoiding the light, they reached the 
garden. " Where shall we go now ? " said 
Lucy; " I see a sentinel on the road above 
and below, and even one on the spring walk." 

" Lord! miss, why d'n't I think," said the 
maid, excitedly, " we's safe; come dissa way." 

** Where are you going.?" asked Lucy, 
following. 

*' Bress de Lord, jes to think, I's been here 
a many a time when de niggas used to run 
away, totin' 'em vittles," said the maid, 
hurrying on. 

*' You, Lucy ? " But it was no time to 
discuss the fugitive-slave question. The way 
was rough; through oak scrub and palmetto 
brush, and gradually descending. The earth 
grew moist under foot; and then the water 
rose over their shoes, over their ankles, up to 
their knees. Then the ground ascended a 
little, and they got among tangled jasmine 
vines and green brier; they stumbled over the 
cypress knees, the foliage getting heavier and 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 53 

denser; and the long drapery of Spanish 
moss hung lower and lower, trailing the 
ground from the boughs above. They turned, 
and, with eyes used to the gloom, discovered 
themselves to be in a sort of hut, roofed with 
the broad fans of palmetto. 

The maid, whose evening task of lighting 
lamps supplied her with matches, lighted a 
small fire of dried leaves and tinder. The 
girls sat trembling, hearing in the distance 
the shouts of the bandits. " Aren't you afraid 
the light will betray us .^ " asked Lucy. 

" Lord, no! dey ain't nuflfin kin fine us but 
dogs; and Massa Earle* done kill all dem," 
said the girl. 



*Earle was a gallant and daring officer belonging to the provost 
marshal's cavalry division of the United States Army, operating 
in the counties lying around New Orleans. He was of Scotch 
parentage, the son of a commission merchant of that city, and 
gave an earnest and active support to the Federal cause. His 
feats, as narrated to the writer by a valiant adversary in the Con- 
federate Army, would read like the prowess of the pristine days 
of chivalry. Having at his command a small steamer, he moved 
with rapidity, and, hearing of detachments of Confederate troops 
within his reach and compass, he would land and burst upon 
them with all the vigor of freshness and surprise. Although 
much employed in the seizure of cotton, he coveted and sought 
the renown due to bold and martial deeds. One of these was a 
charge, with only twelve men, on Colonel Griffin's Battalion, 
C. S. A., lying in camp in Claiborne County, opposite Rodney, 
Mississippi. A vigorous pursuit by the whole command resulted, 
and Earle was, with difficulty, headed off and captured in a lane. 
Sent in charge of a squad to the provost marshal, he escaped on 
the way. But the following morning two of his pursuers came 
upon him breakfasting at a farmhouse. Earle started to his feet 
as they entered, and, interposing a young lady attending between 
him and the guns of his pursuers, he made his escape. Dogs 
having been put upon his track, he was retaken, and upon this 
occasion he adopted the resolution that resulted in the circum- 
stance mentioned in the text, and so faithfully kept the vow, after 



54 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

" That is true; I never expected to be glad 
that poor Tray and Blanche were shot," said 
Lucy, thankfully. 

They sat for some time, and the night 
slowly waned. At length Lucy said with a 
yawn, " Are you sure we're safe, Lucy ? Do 
you know, I'm right down sleepy." 

" Dar's de bed," said the maid, pointing to a 
low couch of Spanish moss in one corner; 
** jis wrap up in ole mas'r's cloak. Lord, 
miss, you's jis as safe as — as — " 

'* Don't say Lord always, Lucy," said her 
mistress. '' When you don't say it in prayer, 
it sounds like — like it was in something else." 
And with this characteristic admonition, the 
tired little widow fell asleep. 



his escape, that for a region of two hundred miles the bark of a 
dog became as rare as the wolf's howl. 

Sent with a double guard to the provost marshal's he accepted 

Earole for the town of Clinton, but, his delivery at Richmond 
aving been ordered, he jumped from the train between Branden 
and Meridian, Mississippi, and made his escape, to renew his 
activity and put in execution his resolution. At last he met a 
soldier's death in the town of Fayette, Jefferson County, Missis- 
sippi. He had heard of the presence of a rival Confederate 
partisan therein, and charged the town. His rival. Sergeant Smith, 
was there with a comrade, who fled. Smith awaited the charge, 
behind a street corner, and fired as Earle rode down. The 
latter fell, and his command scattered. He was conveyed to a 
neighboring house, and lingered till evening, when the bold life 
closed, and he was laid to rest under the flowers of a little garden 
by his kindly enemies, enemies no more. Earle was about five 
feet, ten inches in height, of sandy hair and complexion, and 
wore beard and mustache of like hue. His eyes were small and 
gray, 



CHAPTER V 

MISTRESS and maid both slept, but 
when the gray of morning came, they 
were up, anxious and observant. 
'' Did you hear or see anything, Lucy, after I 
went to sleep ? " asked the widow. 

" Seed de fire; yond' 'tis now. See de red ? 
Spec dey done burnt de barn," said the 
colored girl. 

"No! it is more likely the house. Well, 
let it go. I am very thankful. Can we go out 
now, do you think ? " said Lucy. 

'' S'pos'n' I see," said the maid; but going, 
she soon returned with news that the figures 
and horses of the ruffians were still to be seen 
in the yard and grounds. It was twelve o'clock 
before they ventured cautiously out, and, 
avoiding the smoking ruins of Malvoisee, 
Lucy's dwelling, sought shelter at the Bucks, 
the Shandy place. They were very hungry, 
and, while the maid rummaged about for 
food and cooking vessels in a bachelor's 
kitchen, Lucy strolled into her mother's old 
room. It was used apparently as a bedroom. 
There were pantaloons slung over the bedpost, 
a boot and some old crutches in one corner, a 
violin case on a table, and above the mantel- 
piece a small, vigorous sketch of a female 
head. Lucy took it to the light. It was the 

55 



56 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

face of a middle-aged lady with a mild, sweet 
face, that must have been very pretty once, 
and was lovely even now. She placed it 
carefully back in its place, and then, a-tiptoe, 
opened the violin case. Loose papers were 
scattered over the instrument, and she picked 
up one sheet. It was the commencement 
of some verses, — love verses, too. *' Whom 
does John Shandy write love verses to .? " 
she asked herself, when her eye caught some- 
thing that looked as if it might be another 
sketch. She picked the papers up, for there 
were several, and stepped smiling to the light. 
She started. It was her own fair face; there 
was no mistaking it. " The eyes are too 
large," said Lucy to herself, softly, '' and the 
lashes too long, and it is altogether too pretty, 
but — " But she felt there might have been 
a time when she looked like that. How did 
John Shandy see it ? Had he eyes to see what 
might have been behind what was ? She 
looked further, they were all the same. She 
blushed, for she had a thought that she knew 
to whom John Shandy wrote love verses. 
But a familiar and irregular step startled her, 
and she hastily restored the sketches. It was 
John Shandy, she knew, and she waited a 
moment to recover her composure. She heard 
him enter the adjoining chamber and throw 
himself into a chair, crying in agony, *' O 
my darling, my darling, why did I go away, 
why did I leave you! " and then bursting into 
threats of vengeance on the bandit that made 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 57 

her tremble. It would not do to meet him 
now. Black Lucy must first break the news 
of her safety, and she stole out of the room. 
After the good news was conveyed to him, they 
met, and the propriety of that meeting would 
have pleased evenyour fastidious taste, madam. 

Lucy resolved upon a line of affectionate, 
sisterly conduct towards John Shandy after 
this; but there are some wilful men, not sub- 
ject to the most wisely planned treatment. 
John Shandy was one of these, and Lucy's 
notable plan for his peace and happiness fell 
through. He brought her, a few days later, 
the news of the capture of the bandit and his 
gang by the officer detailed, at his request, for 
the purpose, and things resumed their old way. 

Mr. Melden came back, and Mrs. Melden 
came back. The mother's account of her 
son's valor and sufferings in Lucy's behalf was 
positive eloquence, and Lucy spoke her little 
speeches of gratitude; she was very good at 
little speeches, and the tea fights went on, as 
usual. It vexed John Shandy, and he spoke 
about it in a way that irritated the little widow. 
She "didn't care what the gossips said"; 
was she to be deprived of the comforts of re- 
ligion, and the society of that good man, her 
preserver ? She was her own mistress ; widow- 
hood, she said, with tears in her eyes, gave her 
at least that privilege for all it had taken, and 
she would do as she pleased. So John 
Shandy left her, believing she would finally 
marry the Rev. Mr. Melden. 



58 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

The preacher was in love, — the mildest 
infantile form of the pleasing epidemic; but 
still he had it. "I do think, mother," he had 
said, — " I do think she prefers me. I've half 
a notion to speak." 

'' Make it a whole notion," said the mother 
stoutly. *' Of course, she's got to marry 
somebody, and who else is there for her to 
prefer ? Of course, she's got to marry," 
persisted the widow, indignantly, for she too 
had been a widow and had married a second 
time, and she regarded Lucy's continued 
widowhood as rank treason to a pet theory of 
her own. This was, that widows must marry. 
Maids might remain single, but it was the first 
duty of widowhood, she had chapter and verse 
for it, to be comforted, and how else could 
they be comforted ? It would be wicked to 
refuse, and she did not think Lucy was wicked. 

So Mrs. Melden would not take tea with 
her " sweet little friend " that evening, but 
prayerfully commended her son to Lucy's 
hospitable care; and her son had a duty to per- 
form he only half liked. He was pledged to 
make premeditated love, a task hard enough 
to a braver man. He brought it in awk- 
wardly, though he thought very skilfully, by 
reference to her recent danger, and having at 
last spoken his mind, got a mild and humble 
refusal. He persisted, until Lucy replied to 
a shaft from the maternal quiver, on the duty 
of marriage : " If I must marry, I will marry a 
man, and a brave man, like poor Victor." 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 59 

'' Good heavens! Mrs. Shandy, I will not 
speak of my own courage, but you heard what 
my mother said," answered he. 

" Yes," said she, '' but I have thought 
more of what you said. When I called to you, 
in the hands of that wretch, you replied that 
you were a minister of the gospel. As I said, 
if I must marry, I want a man for a husband. 
Had there been in vour place even poor John 
Shandy " 

But she was not allowed to express an 
opinion of what her cousin would have done 
under the circumstances. 

" John Shandy! " said the preacher; " why, 
you do not compare me to that lame man ? " 

'' No," said Lucy, '* I never saw but one 
man to compare to John Shandy, — my hus- 
band, his cousin Victor." 

" Then you are going to marry John 
Shandy ? " said the mortified suitor, indig- 
nantly. 

** That is just what is none of your business," 
said the little widow, plumply. " I will be 
glad to see you as a friend or pastor, but never 
come to me as you have done this evening, or 
to renew this subject." 

The Rev. Mr. Melden was suppressed; 
and Lucy had offended and convinced each 
of two rivals that she intended to marry the 
other. Mrs. Melden had charge of this new 
piece . of gossip, and managed it skilfully. 
" John Shandy was a dissipated little cripple, 
and almost a murderer for that wicked 



60 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

woman, and now she was going to marry him! 
Well, perhaps it was the best thing she could 
do. Leon," she added, thankfully, " had 
escaped her toils providentially." 

While these events occurred something was 
told to John Shandy that greatly excited and 
disturbed him. The soldier who had brought 
the news of poor Victor Shandy's last words was 
clerking for McCandless at the village store. 
This had kept him apart from John Shandy, 
but they were old schoolmates, and some- 
times met. On a late occasion the veteran re- 
ferred to the prevailing rumor in the village. 

*' Well, Tirs," said he, borrowing a nick- 
name from a pleasant old book now almost out 
of date, " how's the Widow Wadman ? " 

" Dry up that," said Shandy. 

" Oh, I'm agreeable! Poor Vic. I wonder 
how he'd like it," said the soldier, not at all 
agreeably. 

'' Poor Victor," repeated Shandy, trying to 
change the conversation. " It was strange, 
that misprint of ' W. Sanders ' for ' V. Shandy,' 
in the list of killed." 

" Never saw it," said the other, curtly, 
" knew Bill Sanders, though; tall fellow, red 
hair, but gamy, eh! Salty, very. Why, now 
I think. Bill was shot at the same place, but 
not the same day; me an' Vic was knocked 
over next day." 

" Why, was there a' W. Sanders ' in Victor's 
company, a sergeant ? None of us knew it! " 
exclaimed John Shandy, excitedly. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 61 

'' Of course not; joined us at Vicksburg, I 
told you; a regular fire-eater," said the soldier. 

"No! you did not tell me," said Shandy. 
" Did you see Victor after his death ? " he 
inquired. 

" How could I ? " was the reply; " fainted, 
and, when I come to, sawbones had me, taking 
off this other fellow." And he kicked up the 
footless stump. 

*' Then Victor may be alive yet," said 
Shandy. '* Was his name in the Hst of 
killed, do you know ? " he asked. 

" Hardly; never saw no Hst; just pegged off 
home, soon as I could toddle," said the soldier. 

*' But, Bob," urged Shandy, '' then he may 
be alive yet. It is possible for him to be alive, 
you know." 

" Yes, if a man can live with a gallon of 
grapeshot in his body. Ugh! he was mashed 
all to pieces. Oh, he's dead, poor fellow, 
you bet! Besides, you never heard from him 
since," said the veteran. 

** That certainly does look like you are 
right. But there was a negro boy, Floyd, went 
with Victor, and he has never come back," 
said Shandy. 

" A nigga. Oh, they petered out fust fiah! 
That's no sign," said the veteran. 

" Yes," urged Shandy, " but when they 

Eetered out, they petered back home. The 
lacks do that more than the whites. This 
one may have stayed, and taken up his 
master." 



62 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

" Not likely, not at all likely," said the 
soldier, familiar with the negro character. 
*' Poor Vick's drawn his last ration. No 
doubt of her being a widow, if thafs what 
you're at. Why, I heard his last words." 

But John Shandy saw a doubt that excited 
him. " I will find it out," thought he, " if 
I search every battlefield." And so, leaving 
his companion, and cogitating the plans for 
a thorough investigation, he sought his fair 
cousin. 

" Lord, Mass John," said her maid, " whar 
ye been all dis time ? Nobody don't come now; 
miss done kicked de preacher." 

" Kicked the preacher! " said Shandy. 

** Yes, done guv him de sack; I heered it 
myself. Da's miss, now," continued the 
maid. 

" Cousin," said Shandy, " I offended you, 
and you were right to rebuke me." 

'* Cousin John, you are the only friend and 
protector I have in the world, and you were 
right to speak as you did. But Mr. Melden 
is gone, and will come no more, at least as you 
thought he came before." 

John Shandy reflected. His cousin, then, 
had no thought of marrying again, and there 
was no need of revealing his doubts, that 
would probably end only in renewed sorrow 
and disappointment. 

" Cousin," he said, " I am going to take 
a little trip; it may be not a little one, and I 
wish to know what money you have." 



SPIRIT OF' THE SOUTH 63 

'' Oh, heaps! Where are you going? Will 
you need some ? " said Lucy. 

*' None for myself; let me see it," said 

She brought her treasures, — vouchers of 
the Confederate government, certificates of 
the cotton loan. Confederate treasury notes, 
and a small sum in gold and silver. 

John Shandy sighed when he saw how small 
a sum the last was. " I will take these," said 
he, referring to the notes and securities, 
" and try to exchange them. I have sold the 
sugar to Mr. Isaacs. He will pay you to- 
morrow, when he removes it." 

He was going, but she asked, " Will you 
tell me where you are going ? " 

'' Well, no; I may be disappointed. It is 
a duty I alone can do," said he. 

Lucy reflected. John Shandy had an only 
sister living in Tennessee. It must be on her 
account. As he did not choose to speak 
directly, she would inquire no more; but, 
meaning a kindness, she said, " Well, John, 
come back as soon as you can, and if you 
bring any one with you, you know how wel- 
come she will be." John started. " You 
see I have guessed your great secret; you know 
I have a little bird. Well, give her my love." 
And then they parted for the time. 

John wondered what his cousin was at, for 
a few moments. *' Pshaw," said he, " she 
thinks I am going to get married." And he 
dismissed the subject. 



64 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

In the afternoon he handed her fifty dollars 
in gold, the proceeds of as many hundreds in 
Confederate securities. " I had to sell to 
McCandless," said he, " and he skinned you. 
Isaacs will pay you four hundred and fifty, 
in cash or draft, for the sugar in the morning." 

She followed him out, and hung about him. 
"Would he be sure and come back soon.^^ 
She would pray for him and his speedy return. 
And, yes, she put up her lips and kissed him, 
as he stooped from the saddle. 

** Yes," thought he, '' when I return I will 
bring you a protector or offer you one." And 
he was gone. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE reader will understand how the 
months rolled into years, as these events 
progressed to the last annual season of a 
wasting war. And now the evil days drew on, 
and narrowed around the little widow. Her 
maid would announce, *' Uncle Reuben and 
Aunt Sarah done gone; " or, '* George and 
Lucy done gone, miss; " for her slaves were 
leaving her. Soon none remained but Lucy 
and her maid; and the crops were wasting 
in the fields. 

She soon found she would have none to 
gather. The negroes would cut down the 
green cane in broad day, and the worm con- 
sumed the cotton. Her purse began to want 
filling. Careless in expenditure from habit, 
she had negligently permitted the sum put 
in her hands by John Shandy to diminish. 
Still she had Mr. Isaacs's draft for four hun- 
dred and fifty dollars, and she felt easy. She 
took it out, and observed that it was on Mc- 
Candless. She disliked this man exceedingly; 
but she admitted that he was, perhaps, the only 
person in the neighborhood who could honor 
a draft for such an amount. She prudently 
resolved, however, that the money itself was 
better than McCandless's credit, and she took 
advantage of an occasional visit of old Mr. 

65 



66 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

Sambre's to get the order cashed. She was 
explaining its purport to him, when he spoke. 
He " done done business that away before. 
McCandless must pay, or he would bring the 
paper back." And he left on his errand. 

He soon returned. ** Well, Mr. Sambre," 
said she, *' did you get the money ? " 

" Oh, yes, ma'am; no trouble about that," 
said the old man. 

Lucy breathed freer as she took the package 
and opened it. She knew them at once by 
the numbers, — her own Confederate notes. 
She had sold them to McCandless at a cent 
per cent, and they came back to her dollar 
for dollar. 

There was no redress, nothing but to sit 
down and endure. It was all her resources 
gone at one swoop. Her plantation was 
ruined, her money all gone. She must look 
out for a living. She could teach music and 
drawing. Nobody would learn, or could pay 
for such accomplishments. All Lucy's little 
graces were useless. She tried a little school, 
but her patrons could not pay. She tried, 
and did get a little sewing; and, yes, she assisted 
black Lucy at the wash tub. 

One day old Mr. Sambre met the poor little 
woman staggering under a heavy sack. " Bless 
my soul. Lord bless my soul. Ma'am, gimme 
that; what is it .^ " said he. 

" It's very heavy," said Lucy; '* it's pota- 
toes. I didn't know potatoes could be so 
heavy. I bought them to feed Lucy and 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 67 

myself, and they will last such a little while. 
We do eat so much! " 

Another time Lucy and the black girl sat 
over their Lenten fare. *' Tellee what, missis, 
I done seed a bee-tree goin' out to wash dis 
mornin'," said the girl. 

*' A bee-tree going out to wash! Why, Lu, 
what is that ? " asked Lucy, wondering. 

" I don't mean de tree; it's I'se gwine to 
wash, and seed de tree," said the other. 

'' Oh, that! " said Lucy. " Well, what of it r 

*' A heap of it," answered the maid; " dat 
tree done chock full o' honey, ef we could 
git it." 

" Ah! " sighed Lucy, " but how ? " 

** Chop down de tree; s'pos'n' le's try; 
honey's mighty good, even wid taters," said 
the other. 

** Well, I am willing," said her mistress, 
'' but I don't know how to chop, do you ? " 

" Chop wood for de kitchen fire," said the 
black. " You jes come, an' I'll show ye how." 

They did go. They worked at the tree all 
morning. *' How hacked and ugly it looks! " 
said Lucy, pausing to rest. ** I do believe 
it's fatter than when we began. Lucy, this 
tree grows faster than we cut." 

*' No: it don't, it dursn't. I wish lightnin' 
done strike it," said the negress, pausing. 
" S'pos'in' we try ef it won't break now," she 
continued, after a look. 

It was very unpromising, but, with united 
strength, they propped up a stout sapling, and 



68 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

bore against the lever with all their strength. 
The tree swayed and cracked. They cheered 
and panted and pushed, and with a cloud of 
dust the tree broke, not at the cut, but its 
rotted roots, and fell with a crash.* Lucy sat 
down, exhausted as she was, and laughed till 
she cried, but they got the honey. 

As the season advanced cotton picking 
begun, and it was a harvest for this little 
Robinson Crusoe and her woman Friday. 
They were paid in kind, fifty cents on the 
hundred pounds, and the two earned per- 
haps a dollar a day. If the pay was in cotton, 
the country merchant skinned it, in exchange 
for groceries, but it was sometimes in vege- 
tables, meat, or meal. The dealings with the 
store took Lucy to her old enemy McCandless 
in the village, and there she met with the 
soldier clerk. Bob Asa. Bob was kind in his 
way, giving Lucy shockingly partial bargains, 
and one day, when she was out of work, sug- 
gested that McCandless wanted cotton pickers, 
and paid well. *' He will not see you; his 
overseer manages it all, and I do the paying," 
said he, persuasively. Lucy was reluctant, 
but needs must, and so she and her black 
companion went to the work. Bob was, for 
once, mistaken. That day, by accident, Mc- 
Candless did come out and saw the widow. 
Poverty had not deepened the soft lines of that 
delicate face, or distorted the light, active 

*This authentic incident occurred in Florida, during the war, 
and is related with circumstance and addition the writer does 
not attempt to follow. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 69 

figure. She was fair to look upon, this Ruth 
gleaning in the cotton, and McCandless was 
quite willing to enact Boaz. He was of a sel- 
fish but emotional nature, and very tender of 
himself over the death of his poor, hard- 
worked wife. He began his attentions with 
suflScient skill. Cotton, like other natural 
products, is governed by the soil, and in the 
same field it will boll out beautifully or be 
sparse, according to the nourishment furnished. 
Observing Lucy and her companion to be 
toiling on the meager side of the patch, he 
changed them to the more luxuriant slope, 
but did not that day address the mistress. 
The next day he did refer to his late loss, 
similar to her own, and shed a few tears; for 
McCandless thought it hard to lose his wife 
in the harvest season, and Lucy gave the man 
credit for a better nature than he possessed. 

He came afterwards daily and tried to get 
up an intimacy. The cotton picking occupied 
several weeks, and when it ended another 
task offered. The Lanfranc and Shandy 
sugar w^as famous in those old days, a brand 
commanding the best market. This was due 
to the care observed in its boiling, and the 
just promptitude in removing the mass from 
the kettles at the true granulating point. 
Lucy had, in her way, learned all this, and the 
year previous had made all the sugar of the 
plantation. It was conceded, by black and 
white, that she had no equal in this delicate 
operation, and McCandless desired her ser- 



70 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

vices. She refused plumply at first, as it was 
a task requiring unintermitting attention day 
and night; but when McCandless proposed to 
wagon the cane to the Lanfranc sugar mill, still 
unimpaired, Lucy, with proviso and ex- 
ception, consented. 

She made Bob Asa her lieutenant in this 
work, and kept him about as a sort of guard; 
but he could not, nor could she, altogether 
keep off McCandless, who inclined more and 
more to the part of Boaz as this Ruth shrank 
from that cast for her. Good natured and 
coarse, he still had some of the Irish native 
wit and sentiment under the rough husk, and it 
flowered out in the reluctant sunshine of the 
widow's charms. As she spoke civilly and gent- 
ly to him, with the courtesy of her sex and breed- 
ing, the selfish vanity of the man took hope. 

The evening the work was finished it rained 
heavily. McCandless drove up in a hand- 
some new close carriage, with an ugly hand 
sprawling over the panel, which he was kind 
enough to inform Lucy was the '' arrums of the 
ould McCandless famuly." She declined, 
however, to be enclosed in such " arrums," and 
preferred walking. But he had not brought 
the money. '' Wud the leddy jist stip in; it 
was as aisy as her own swate ways, to be sure," 
and they would " rowl down to the shtore 
for the cash, an' she should go home like in 
her own carruge, as in ould times." 

Lucy was vexed. She was determined to 
have this money down, and it was too late 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 71 

to walk. But she would not ride alone with 
McCandless. " Get in, Captain Asa," she 
said to her bodyguard, and in the Confederate 
stepped, very coolly and leisurely, while the 
Irishman looked blank at this sudden snapping 
of his little network plot. 

He was not a man, however, to be easily 
repulsed, and the same evening he called at the 
widow's shelter. He was refused admittance at 
first, but, pleading ** business," at length was 
received. The widow stood holding by the 
sitting-room door, facing him, with a letter 
which she had, apparently, been interrupted in 
reading, in the other hand. It was the attitude 
of one who expected to answer a question or two 
before closing the door on the speaker, and re- 
suming a previous, more important occupation. 
If it was premeditated, it was a quiet stroke of 
genius. It demoralized the enemy, so to speak. 

He was excited. There was a purpose, not 
thoroughly defined, in his mind to win the 
widow, and on that night. He struggled 
against the conscious scowl growing on his 
face at the sight of the thoroughly defensible 
position, and slipped into his brogue and 
blarney: "Sure how can a swate crature be 
so crule as to shtand widh her purty fut on' 
his hear-rut an' her sarvent askin' her to 
warrum it in his boo-som." 

The enemy did not even show her colors to 
this assault. 

'' What is your business.'^ " she said; " I 
am engaged." 



72 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

*' Sure an' that's me business; for ye to be 
ingaged to be marrid; to meself, I mane." 
He saw her face chill and harden and her nos- 
trils quiver at this assault, and he again 
changed. " It's alone ye are here, loike a 
burred in its cage, an' it's poor ye are; the 
little penny is soon gone, bad luck to the same 
and sorra a bit more to fade thim roses an 
yer chakes. It wud deloight Terry Mc- 
Candless to presarve the same; to take the 
purty burred out o' the cage and set it free in 
his arrums, with a carruge of its own to roide 
in, to be sure." 

*' You may be jesting or drunk, sir, but this 
house is no place for you," said the widow, 
only angry as yet. 

** Divil a bit has touched my lips, barrin' 
a mouthful to yer health and for luck, widdy. 
If it's the gossoon Pathrick, sure an' he can 
go to the school, or to the divil, for the matther 
of that; and if it's manes, sure an' I'm rich, 
and plaze the pigs, ef the war goes an, it's 
more the richer I'll be; spake, an' we'll have 
the praist at wanst. Hear to raison," he 
continued, pushing in as the widow drew back; 
" divil a bit can ye live like this; ye must 
marry, and bedad ye shall marry me," he said, 
boldly and persistently. " For betther or for 
wurrus, them's the wurruds; take me for luve, 
or bedad for hate, as you loike, but it's take 
me you shall." And he looked more brutal 
as the dark instincts of his nature grew into 
his face. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 73 

" Wretch! do you think me without pro- 
tection? Who should know better than you 
that God provides an avenger for the widow ? 
This letter is from John Shandy. He is 
coming. Villain, will you dare to wait till 
he hears of this insult ? " 

The animal in him quailed before the high- 
spirited Southern beauty, threatening that 
fierce Southern law of personal redress whose 
deadly certainty he knew. 

" Be gorra, thin, marm, an' I nivir heard 
before it was an insult to ask a lady to marry," 
he growled, remonstrating. 
1^.- ' Such asking would be an insult from 
crowned king or ragged beggar, and from you, 
— your very presence has been an insult." 
And she slammed the door on his retreating 
face, bolted it, and sat down trembling with 
excitement. 

Lucy had threatened this man with John 
Shandy's coming; but the letter Lucy held, 
though speaking of his return, did it ob- 
scurely, and set no period. She thought of 
this the next day, and, consulting with her 
maid, she resolved to ojffer a room to the lame 
soldier. 

He gladly accepted the offering; and poor 
Bob Asa being, in this way so near such a 
brilliant intoxicating light, must need flicker 
in the flame a little, poor moth! 

" Why, Captain Asa," said the indignant 
widow, *' I am ashamed of you. I thought 
you were my friend. I asked you to come on 



74 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

purpose, and now you must go and talk to me 
just like other men." 

" Flanked, by George! '* said the discom- 
fited soldier. " Dog on it, Mrs. Shandy, I 
thought you'd like it." 

'* But I don't, you see. I dislike it very 
much; and you mustn't do so any more," said 
the widow, sharply. 

" Curse the luck! " said the soldier; *' I 
thought you hankered after me. Black Lucy 
told me so, anyhow." 

" Black Lucy is a goose; don't you be one. 
You see, I don't hanker for you. I don't 
hanker, as you call it, for anybody. I am a 
sort of little Southern Confederacy that wants 
to be let alone, and I wanted you to be my 
soldier," the little widow replied. 

The illustration pleased Bob, and as he 
promised " not to do so any more," they got 
on quite contentedly for a while. 

But the sure heavy weight was slowly, 
slowly coming down. As a man heaves a huge 
block up with an effort and holds it, you ad- 
mire the stiffened sinews, the development of 
muscle in the energy of will and force bent to 
the elaborate task. But watch the sturdy 
lifter! Slight, imperceptible quivers shake the 
muscles; the frame quivers, the smile of tri- 
umph fades into doubt. The huge block has 
done nothing; has remained dumb, quiet, 
oppressive. It has put out no effort against 
that great will force, that gallant and graceful 
play of fibre and muscle; it just weighs and 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 75 

weighs, with a silent, unalterable law, down- 
ward, downward. 

So I have thought poverty sometimes lies, 
huge, misshapen, and ponderous, on a gallant 
soul. We cannot look and admire, for we see 
the vital force must yield to a weight beyond 
its strength. So, on poor Lucy the great 
volume of existence settled more and more 
heavily. 

There was no more cotton picking, no more 
sugar making. Then the Federal Army came 
in. The ravages of the negroes, bad enough 
before, became unendurable, destructive. She 
had to give up her little garden; it was plun- 
dered of its vegetables before they were ripe. 
Her ** soldier," as she had called Asa, had 
been forced to sacrifice his situation or to leave 
the widow's. Poor fellow, he too had to 
surrender to the burden beyond his strength. 
As it was inculcated industriously by their new 
masters that a common school education in- 
cluded all the moral virtues, Lucy attempted 
a little school among those who had been her 
servants. It was not Bible lessons or the pure 
morals of a Saviour they wanted. A, B, C, 
included it all, and these Lucy undertook 
to teach. 

Let any young New England girl, just 
ventured from a quiet, loving home into the 
hard world to teach, recall that charge given 
her, where ignorant and vulgar patrons thought 
the meager sums doled out gave them a right 
to censure and dictate, and let her imagine the 



76 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

coarseness and impertinence hugely exagger- 
ated upon a grosser ignorance, and she will 
realize some of poor Lucy's trials. The tuition 
fees were in food, the coarse food of the negroes 
themselves, and it was grudgingly given. It 
was slowly starving and slowly killing her, 
when black Lucy, her maid, broke it up. 
Lucy thanked her and lay down quietly to die. 
But, teaching the blacks, she had become 
known to some Federal officers having to do 
with the same poor material; and the evening 
black Lucy ordered the pupils to " cFar out 
and nebber come back da no mo'," two Federal 
soldiers inquired for lodgings at the widow's 
house. 



CHAPTER VII 

LUCY'S new boarders were an elderly 
and a young man, father and son. The 
elder was a grave, quiet man, having 
some semi-civil, semi-military duties. The son 
was a brisk, romping fellow of twenty-one or 
two, full of spirits. It amused Lucy to hear 
the crisp, cool syllables, so different from the 
broad, soft vowels and Southern intonation. 
He would laugh over his college scrapes, his 
*' doing the faculty " out of his diploma by 
enlisting, his loves and his hates, in a perfectly 
frank, humorous manner, willing indifferently 
to be laughed with or laughed at, so she 
laughed. He would tell how his father en- 
listed *' just to be near him," with tears, and 
then bubble over with some ridiculous flirta- 
tions of the watering places. He courted the 
widow, of course, in a week; wrote quite 
scholarly sonnets to her, and laughed and pro- 
tested and talked about " the little Yankee 
girl he was going home to marry when the 
war was over." It was the champagne of 
love, iced; but in icing it was tempered in its 
more intoxicating qualities. 

One day he found the widow sad over a 
letter. He did what a Southerner would have 
avoided, by asking her " what was the matter." 

" Only a letter from a lady who thinks I 
77 



78 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

am rich, and wants to live with me as house- 
keeper, poor thing. She says her son was 
slain in the same battle Victor, my husband, 
was, and it seems to confirm poor Victor's 
death. If Malvoisee had a roof, she would be 
welcome, but it has none for me to offer poor 
Mrs. — Sanders is the name." 

"Malvoisee.^" said the officer; "it's the 
burned place next here; was it yours ? " 

" Yes, it is mine," said the widow. "Why.? " 

** Oh, I'm so sorry, it was sold for delayed 
taxes this morning; a fellow, McCandless, 
below here, bought it," said the lieutenant. 

** It was the widow's home. Do you call 
that making war, Mr. Endicott ? " 

The soldier winced. " I don't like it," 
he said; " but war is war, and the government 
tries to get paid so as to pay its army." 

" That is, my place was sold to get money 
for the government to pay those who slew my 
husband, for the slaying. Does your Bible 
say anything about seething a kid in its 
mother's milk, Lieutenant ? " said the widow, 
very softly. 

The lieutenant|was silent. " Hang it, it's 
all loot for that rascal, McCandless. I'll 
block him. I will see the governor and 

General , and have the thing stopped." 

But the generous youth was not permitted to 
carry out his act of chivalrous justice, nor to 
speak to father or friend in the matter. The 
unseen shadow that walks beside us all and 
watches its opportunity was drawing near. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 79 

and as he talked his winding-sheet was high up 
on the throat. The Confederates still hung a 
cloud in the distance, occasionally throwing out 
a tongue of flame and destruction. That 
evening, on rumors of such a raid, young 
Endicott gathered a force of scouts and 
started to reconnoitre. About three o'clock 
in the afternoon, the two parties. Federal and 
Confederate, encountered in a little field in 
sight of the house. Each party was small, 
numbering twenty or thirty, but the conflict 
was short and desperate. Young Endicott 
fell, and his friends were retreating slowly on 
the house, when the elder Endicott came up 
with reinforcements, and the Confederates, 
in turn, fell back. 

The poor young man was brought into the 
widow's room. She had suffered, as the 
reader knows, by the war, but it had never 
before dashed its actual red surf over her 
threshold. Yet shocked as she was, all feeling 
gave way in sympathy for the agonized father. 

He only walked up and down, up and down, 
repeating the passionate words of the Hebrew 
king, " Oh, my son Absalom, my son, my son 
Absalom; would I had died for thee! Oh, 
Absalom, my son, my son! " over and over 
again, wrenching his hands all the time, and 
walking up and down, up and down. 

It was with difficulty he was so far soothed 
as to be removed, while the last soldierly 
attentions were paid by the young man's 
comrades. He was laid to rest in the little 



so SPIRIT OP THE SOUTH 

widow's flower garden, and the next day the 
father was calmer. He said to his hostess, 
with a great sob that contradicted his words, 
in the language of the heroic king, " I will 
mourn no more. I shall go to him, but he 
S'hall not return to me." 

With a sad difference the old ways returned, 
but not to him. He was changed and broken. 
An old man before, the blow had aged him 
greatly, and he loved to spend his leisure with 
the poor, lonely little widow. He spoke of his 
son and then of his wife gone before, and told 
his life story, of a long love and a late marriage 
with his first love, and of her death; then of his 
enlisting, to be near his son. In her sympathy, 
the poor old man found comfort, and she came 
to regard him, this alien enemy, with some- 
thing of filial solicitude. They were useful 
to one another, these two people lonely in the 
world. The little money for his board sup- 
plied the table, and he assisted in her garden 
and gave her protection. 

When the peace came, it brought no peace 
here. The sound was a mockery to them. 
" I will return to you, my child," said he, 
" some day." 

But Lucy only said, " I know you think 
so, but you will not. I seem to be enclosed 
in a charmed circle of sorrow. When I was a 
foolish girl I had many lovers, who all went 
away vowing to return. They never came. 
So father and mother crossed the dark river. 
Then my uncle went, and never returned. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 81 

Then I won my Victor, and my charmed circle 
became sacred; but he, too, went to his duty, 
and never came back to me. After that I had 
a noble, true friend who went to bring his 
sister to us, but he has passed the charmed 
circle and will never return. You think you 
will return, but you cannot. The fatal circle 
is about me and cannot be passed." 

He was very much affected. " Sit down," 
said he, taking her hand; ** I am an old man 
and must speak; first, some sad news, and 
then some other words, meant to be kind, my 
child; believe me, meant to be kind. Tell me, 
is this yours, this place where you live ? " 

" No," said Lucy, ** it is my cousin's, John 
Shandy's. My place, Malvoisee, has been 
taken away from me." 

" Alas, yes," said the old man; " and, my . 
poor child, this too has been sold for delayed ^ 
taxes. One McCandless bought it. Is he a 
friend? Will he " 

'' No! he is my hard enemy. Now, indeed, 
is all shelter gone," sobbed the widow. 

"No, my child, not all. Hear me. I am 
an old man, and past the years of lovers. I 
will speak plainly. I offer you a home; I ask 
you, will you be my daughter, under the name , 
of wife ? If I was a rich man, I might do 
better for you, if you would let me, but I am 
not. I can only take you with me, and guard 
you under the name of wife; but you shall be 
my daughter only, my poor widowed daughter; 
a,nd I am a weak, old man with no other ties," 



82 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

And he was silent. After a while he said, " I 
will leave you now, my child, to think over 
what I have said. You know it is sincere; 
you know I mean to be kind." 

" I know you are kind," said Lucy, extend- 
ing her hand. " I will think about it." And 
they parted. 

She did think of it. She reviewed the past, 
and saw how fate had narrowed around her. 
She thought of John Shandy and his love, his 
goodness to her. It was a crown to her, and 
something to be very proud of; but her hus- 
band's image arose before her, vivid with dear 
associations; and as the bounty of his manly 
love flowed through the channels of recollections, 
old hopes and feelings and expressions flowered 
up in the kindly moisture. She loved her 
husband yet, deeply, purely, tenderly, with all 
the passion of a wife's first love. She loved 
no one else. The very thought of so loving 
another was pain, even were it John Shandy. 
Poor John Shandy! 

But this other .^ She knew without argu- 
ment, it was different, and knew what the 
relation would be better than he who offered 
it. She knew that he was and would be truly 
all he said. She knew, too, what her part 
must be. She would be his nurse. She 
would have the care of him; and there would 
be irksome duties and hard trials, but she 
would never be his wife, never be called so 
by him; she would only be his daughter. She 
saw that future plainly as in a glass. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 83 

There are periods, crises in life, which 
almost every one can recall, when some innate 
power acts that is not the reason of logic with 
cause and effect, nor the discriminating judg- 
ment, weighing alternatives. It is neither 
advocate nor judge. It reveals; it does not 
argue. We see pictured as in a mirror a far 
future, as if we had lived it. We know, with- 
out an effort of reason, but as of recollection, 
just what events and feelings are to follow 
from a defined course. It leaves no room 
for doubt or argument. Judgment only 
comes in to determine which we will ac- 
cept. 

So it was with Lucy. She saw herself as 
the nominal wife, the actual daughter and 
nurse of old Mr. Endicott. She saw what 
that life was, that it was not one of ease. She 
saw years of drudgery, of care, of exceeding 
patience. She saw the waning age of an old 
man growing captious, irritable, complaining, 
and selfish. She saw herself in his house, 
bearing all, suffering all, in irksome care and 
silence. She saw a household, sufficient but 
narrow; hopes, feelings, sentiments, all starved 
into that existence, and bounded by an old 
and broken man's narrow economies. She 
saw years and customs growing on her, and 
crushing old ways of thought and speech, and 
knew that she would be altogether different, — 
different even in herself and to herself, a sad 
and soured old woman who had missed all the 
flower of life. 



84 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

What else? She would live alone. Her 
life would be her own. Bearing all this cark 
and care of another, she would bear none of 
her own. She would be the living, loving wife 
of Victor Shandy, with no presumptuous 
image to thrust between her and that dear 
nourishing sweetness of her existence, her love 
for her dead husband. But the other alter- 
native ? No prophetic clairvoyance was needed 
here. If she refused the offer, she saw the 
future in the past, the last bitter year. She 
knew she had courage, and the will to work, 
the slave of this cruel body, if she could find 
the work to do. She could not plough or chop 
wood or wash; and these comprehended the 
demands of that impoverished neighborhood. 
Her accomplishments in that barren spot 
were like Robinson Crusoe's gold; it would 
buy nothing, it was useless. If she stayed she 
might teach school, teach the negro children, 
be the patient, insulted drudge of these poor, 
ignorant slaves, drunk with new, misunder- 
stood freedom. As all the memory of that 
sickening endurance and final failure crawled 
like a loathsome worm over her, she shuddered 
and brushed it away. It was not the will to do, 
but the power to do, was in question; and she 
knew that power was not in her. 

Lucy was a brave woman. She had fought 
the good fight. She had been patient and 
even cheerful under trials that would have 
snapped a steel less fine and finely tempered 
than her own, but Lucy was. too^ wise and too 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 85 

brave not to know and to face the truth. She 
did not pretend that she could not preserve a 
sordid existence, at the gates of starvation, 
by herself, in this corner, but it would be at the 
expense of degradation to her womanhood, to 
that preserving purity sustained by womanly 
occupations. It would cost too much. So 
this little soldier was prepared to surrender 
her sword. Not because she was unwilling 
to fight, but because she saw fighting would 
not gain what she desired and struggled 
for. It would only be a species of sui- 
cide. 

She gave a last sad thought to poor John 
Shandy. Never in her life did she love and 
honor him more than when, in this final crisis 
of life, she weighed his wishes with her power 
to grant. She knew that she could not marry 
John Shandy, as she might marry this old 
man, giving nothing of what he asked in 
exchange. She knew, if she married him, she 
ought to give, and he ought to ask, a whole, 
undivided, wifely love; that it would be a lie to 
marry him, denying him this. And so, gently 
and tenderly loving him the more in her tears, ^ 
she put him away in her thought, and sorrowed 
for him as for a dear, dead friend. Poor 
John Shandy! 

So she sat in the twilight singing, very low, 
a strange, old melody she had not recalled for 
years. It was her own story, the story of a 
brave woman conquered, and she whispered 
it^softly,— 



86 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

'* And young Jamie at the sea, — 
And auld Robin Gray cam' a-courtin* o' me.** 

Mr. Endicott came in. He looked troubled. 
'' Have you thought, my child ? Have you 
thought of any other way I can help you ? " 

" No, none; none by which I can help you 
in return," said the widow, softly. 

" Ah! well, when you please, you can tell 
me. Never mind," he said, as the widow 
made an effort to speak. " There, let me 
have my w ay ; to-morrow ? Well, I have news 
for you; good news " 

But a noise startled them, and black Lucy 
came running in, stumbling, and screaming. 
'' Lord, miss," said she, " Floyd's done come; 
Mass John's done come." iVnd she fell in a 
fit. No need of announcement. The grave, 
handsome face and figure of Victor Shandy 
rose above his cousin's, upon whose shoulder 
one hand, half embracing, lay lightly as he 
stood in the doorway. '' It is Victor: it is my 
husband. O Victor, Victor! " and the brave, 
over-tired little wife fell in his arms. 

The two, John and Victor Shandy, had 
spoken first to old Mr. Endicott, who had 
come up from his quarters in the village to 
break the news of her husband's return to his 
wife; but youth and impatience, as we know, 
had anticipated the slow, hesitating old man's 
action. It was as well. Joy does not kill. 

Victor Shandy's story must be recorded. 
Taken up by Floyd, and a prisoner, he was 
exchanged, after his recovery, and enlisted in 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 87 

a different regiment; was wounded in the 
retreat from Petersburg, and found by John 
Shandy sick and heartbroken over a rumor 
of his wife's marriage. The failure of their 
frequent letters, mutually written each other, 
was an occurrence too frequent at that period, 
in the South, to need explanation or comment. 
The colored boy, Floyd, to Bob Asa's intense 
disgust and incredulity, had actually stood by 
his master to the last; nay, stands by him yet, 
with a wife to help him who is quite reconciled 
to " dat nigga's " not having ** done got his- 
self killed"; and they are the servants of 
Victor and Lucy Shandy, and call them Mars 
Vic and Miss Lucy. 

The pretty widow is won. Is there any 
more to tell ? McCandless is prospering after 
his kind, in purse and its respectability; and 
as man, Hke water, finds his level, he is prob- 
ably now, or soon will be, in Congress. Is 
that all ? 

No. The moon is setting, and sending its 
long, slant glories through the trees, bringing 
out the broad galleries of rebuilt Malvoisee 
in the clear obscure. The child of the old 
love listens silently at his knee to the soft, 
melancholy flow of the violin; for John Shandy 
is playing. A light wind bears the odors of 
flowers. Tike incense, from the garden and 
Lucy listens in her chamber, silently, in tears, 
as the harmony of '* Auld Robin Gray " 
floats softly in. She thinks of the poor old 
man to whom Heaven was kind, in taking him 



88 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

home from a lonely world, and her heart fills 
with old memories and trials of that sad time. 
But the music flows on, flows on, in sweeter 
curves and changes. Sad old plantation airs, 
with stories of a way of tenderness in life that 
shall be no more forever, melt from the 
strings and mingle with the rustle of the leaves. 
The music sobs like the spirit of the past, 
about the galleries and deserted cabins. No 
more that melodious charm will call troops of 
happy, wondering black faces, from nooks and 
recesses of the old cabins, to linger entranced 
at the spell. 

But John Shandy plays on. Snatches of 
old dreams and of an old delight, idealized 
and purified above the earth, faints in the 
tender symphonies. The old love has grown 
and softened into a precious feeling, that 
belongs to no one on earth, and yet is not all 
the creation of that tender, loving heart. Born 
in heaven and nourished on the bounty of a 
sweet, unselfish nature, it floats on the long, 
soft swells and cadences, rising musically, 
tenderly, in lengthened undulations to its 
home. As the disk of the setting moon grows 
broader and broader in the foliage and the 
sliadows darken around its eclipse, the 
soft clear voice breaks out, in a sweet old 
hymn, to the according violin. Does it 
associate itself with the sympathies and 
heroes of a Lost Cause, mingled with the 
devout inspiration of a loving and relying 
heart? ^ 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 89 

" Through sorrow's night and danger's path, 
Among the gathering gloom, 
We, soldiers of an injured king. 
Are marching to the tomb." 

And the last faint glimmer of the setting moon 
is gone, and all is dark. 



REVEREND MR. BLAND'S WRESTLE 
WITH THE CHESTER WHITE HOG 

THE scene of the Rev. Mr. Bland's trial 
lies among the Salt River hills, Ken- 
tucky, with a homely but picturesque 
village nestled in the low farming lands, 
which begin on the north bank, the limbo 
of politicians, and slope off into the Ohio 
basin. Handsome country seats adorn the 
spurs of adjacent hills, and overlook the 
checkerboard verdure of field and fallow, 
with the soft blue velvet knobs falling away, 
south and west, at either hand. The Ohio 
River has burst its way through the range, 
forming a beautiful cluster of sand and rocky 
islets, or more fertile tracts, in the rapids, 
which are fast wasting away under the grand 
trowels of the water-shed. But as we follow 
the little tributary we meet the contrast of wild 
and rugged scenery of hill, dale, and river 
lying contiguous to arable and pasture, to 
which the pleased imagination gives the name 
of the Picturesque. A certain unexpected- 
ness adds to the charm of contrasts in travel 
through this region, which, indeed, is best 
pursued, w^ith dog and gun. Now we come 
on farms lusty in tilth, the partridge whirring 
in the stubble, and wide-open barns bursting 
with harvest; then a turn brings us upon 
scenes of wild, untutored nature, unspoiled 
by the woodman's axe, or Macadam's inven- 
tion of road-bed, out of which suddenly the 



m SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

wild glens develop a stately villa, embroidered 
with walks, drives, shrubbery, and fair pavil- 
ions set in the lonely forest. Crossing the 
various tributaries of Floyd's Fork, Long 
Run, Harrod's Creek, and classic Beargrass, 
we meet continuous examples of the physical 
law that ascribes to each watershed its own 
peculiar features, till, from a gentle acclivity, 
the characteristic unexpectedness develops 
the broad, squared avenues, the stately roofs, 
chimneys, and cupolas of the city of Louis- 
ville. The same prevailing spirit of contrast 
reappears in a population in which the highest 
culture associates with rural simplicity; or 
humanity preserves its savage characteristics 
among the rough, lawless charcoal burners of 
the Wet Woods. 

It has been many years since I looked upon 
these scenes, once so familiar to my boyish 
sports; yet they lie before the mind's eye as 
vivid as the soft, half -tropical beauty of foliage 
that meets my daily walks. Many pleasing 
reminiscences of books and men and boyish 
playfellow have knitted themselves into the 
embroidery of these old home scenes; and it 
pleases my fancy to reflect that the subjective 
sensation still remains, as vivid to my imagi- 
nation as if I were actually to look on them 
again, and more harmonious. Indeed, with- 
out the sensitive receptive faculty of the boyish 
heart, I fear the new impressions would come 
like a blurred photograph that disfigures 
more than it represents. Nothing is more 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 93 

dangerous than revisiting scenes on which 
memory too fondly dwells; for if we do not 
find saddening changes in the scenes them- 
selves, we are sure to find them in the altered 
feeling in ourselves with which we look upon 
them. 

The Rev. Mr. Bland was assigned to the 
village church in one of these neighborhoods 
about the time it suffered a loss in the death 
of the Hon. James Griffin, formerly member 
of Congress from the district. The reverend 
gentleman was rather a strict disciplinarian 
for the gentle and forbearing Methodist Epis- 
copal Church, but he had delivered his famous 
sermon on the prophecies of Daniel, and the 
city churches in which he had been alternated 
for many years were reluctant to lose the ser- 
vices of a preacher of such piety and scholar- 
ship. But the good man had lost his wife a 
short time before, and was anxious for a 
change. He brought with him his daughter 
Estella, no less an acquisition to the young 
people than her father proved to be to the 
society of her elders. 

He bore with composure the pseudo enthu- 
siasm which welcomes every newcomer, and 
gradually established himself in the confidence 
of the more select body of reflecting persons 
capable of understanding his practical and 
mathematical theory of the prophecies. A 
part of his congregation did, indeed, look 
upon him a little coldly, as a Presbyterian in 
disguise; and one loose fish, of no church at 



94 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

all, objected that Rev. Mr. Bland wanted 
every one to wear his Sunday go to meetin's 
a week days — an extravagance of habit, he 
thought, few even of church-goers could afford. 
As usual, there was a leaven of justice in these 
criticisms. Mr. Bland inclined to severity 
in discipline, and his habits of accurate 
thought led him to election and predestination 
in theory. 

But the mild gossip which, in America at 
least, grows out of an abstract difference of 
doctrine was soon lost in the keener zest of a 
rumor which connected his name with the 
relict of the late Mr. Griffin — a very interest- 
ing and wealthy widow lady of the neighbor- 
hood. There could be no inequality in a 
marriage between a gentleman of probity, 
piety, and reputation, and the widow of the 
late representative in Congress, however am- 
ple her dower, and his congregation viewed it 
with satisfaction, as a means of attaching him 
to them. But others, connected with the 
lady, objected, from chiefly interested motives. 
Mrs. Miller, nee Sally Sampson, wife of 
Robert Miller, the lady's brother, was the 
principal of these. My neighbor, Tom Gwynn, 
— a hearty, manly fellow, — said that Mrs. 
Sally ordered up the junior of Miller, Sampson, 
and Co., Mr. Job Newsants, from the counting 
house as she would order a horse from the 
stables, and came down to make a Sabine 
marriage. It was good as a play to hear 
Tom swear out his prejudices about Mrs. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 95 

Sally. He said she had traded on Hon. 
James Griffin's influence, and filled her side- 
board full of china and silver as presents, until 
she drove him out of politics. Then she had 
borrowed his wife's inheritance of the Colonel 
to put in her husband's business, " because, 
you know, dear, you never gave Robert Miller 
anything when you had influence." " She 
got at him about our investments in wild 
land," laughed Tom; '* said it was wicked, 
and quoted the parable of the buried talent 
on us. I offered to put up the monument to 
Jim myself," added Tom Gwynn, " if they'd 
let me write the inscription — ' Died of a 
Sally Sampson.' " 

** What sort of a person is this gentleman ? 
what is his name .? " I asked. 

" Nuisance," blurted out Tom, stretching 
his long arm out for the flask. We had 
stopped to lunch at Rock Spring while part- 
ridge shooting. " A confounded nuisance. 
There are men. Will, — and they fill no undis- 
tinguished places in the world, — who find a 
corner in the midst of its most audacious 
ventures, and yet take no risk. Messieurs y 
faites voire jeu, is content with the sure per 
cent of the table. That's the fellow, by the 
croupier's face of him. And that woman — 
O Lord! " he ejaculated. " She heard of the 
parson's visits of condolence — I hope he 
may get her — and she just lit down on the 
poor woman: * Robert Miller could not come. 
I've just run down to see how you are getting 



96 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

on. It must be right pleasant to have 
things your own way, and nobody to 
hinder.' " 

" Come, old fellow," said I, *' that is too 
strong — congratulating a woman on the 
death of her husband; draw it mild." 

" Not a bit," said Gwynn. " Nelly heard 
it. Depend on it, Sally Sampson- did not 
think it a shocking speech. It suited her to 
have poor Jim out of the way, and it must 
be so to everybody. Besides, there was more 
of it, Nelly told me. ' You'll like Job New- 
sants,' was her next speech. ' So much 
dignity, force of character. Just the husband 
for Emma,' I said. You know, if you or I 
had gone on in that style to Emma Griffin six 
weeks after poor Jim died, she would have 
dropped off in hysterics. But what's the use ? 
The poor thing, with forty chattels of her 
own on the place, was wondering who would 
take Mr. Newsants's horse, and what in the 
deuce Aunt Abby in the kitchen would find 
for these people to eat. Oh, Em has got to 
marry. She can't manage that place. I hope 
Mr. Bland will come to time. What is he 
holding back for.^ " 

Why, indeed ? It was no use for the widow 
to try to defend herself, or to deny herself to 
Mr. Newsants. He would be rolled in on his 
casters by Mrs. Sally, and his merits as an 
article of furniture cracked up in the bagman's 
plainest prose. It was certainly time for a 
protector to appear. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 97 

But there was a burden on the spirits of 
Mr. Bland which deprived him of that airy 
lightness necessary to captivate the butterfly 
of a lady's affection. It was not his daughter 
Estella, for Mr. George Shanklin was anxious 
to relieve him of that incumbrance. Neither 
was it the prevalence of heretical opinion in 
mesmerism and table tipping necromancy. 
Nor did it grow out of his interpretation of the 
Book of Daniel, by which the heaven was to be 
rolled up like a scroll at a period significant 
of nothing worse than the rolling up of the 
Southern rebellion. Neither was it that the 
want of a riding horse gave his visits on an 
animal at livery too much the appearance of a 
shop-boy's holiday. 

No: his difficulties were of far too serious 
a character to spring from wounded vanity 
or morbid self-consciousness. It was of the 
kind that lies down with one and gets up with 
him. It was of the malicious I don't know 
what to do with you kind. 

" This sort of grief 
Cannot find in religion the slightest relief." 

or the Rev. Mr. Bland would have found it. 
It was too ridiculously insignificant and con- 
temptible to think about; and he could think 
about nothing else. Yet he did not dare 
mention it, or even hint of it, for fear of 
ridicule. It did not touch his conscience or 
moral character, it affected no one but him- 
self, and yet it was no physical defect or 



98 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

obliquity. It would injure him in the good 
opinion of no one if known, yet it lowered him 
in his own eyes, and rebuked his whole life for 
a want of charitableness for the weakness or 
foibles of others. It arose up in judgment, 
and turned his own intellectual skill against 
him, whipping through any casuistry with 
which he would shield himself. Moreover, it 
degraded him in his own eyes, as a man and a 
gentleman, to feel how severely its con- 
temptible insignificance preyed upon him. 
It was a pig. 

One of his parishioners, soon after his 
coming to the village, had presented him with a 
Chester White pig. Mr. Bland had been bred 
in the city, and his life had been passed in 
cities. The country and its primitive habits 
he knew only through the mirage of his reading ; 
and these pictured the life as full of rural sim- 
plicity, and healthful occupations among the 
flocks and herds. From the Bucolics to 
Thomson's " Seasons " the ideal felicities of 
such an existence had gone on ripening, 
in the turmoil of the city, until, indeed, it 
became the motive in him which had in- 
fluenced the Conference to locate him among 
such scenes. The pig, therefore, was an 
expression, a realization to the preacher's 
mind, of many vague, half-poetic longings for 
a pastoral life; it was the thing itself incarnate, 
and he rejoiced in it. It was such a plump, 
full-bodied, cleanly pig. It was an intelli- 
gent pig, and subject to the gentler influences. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 99 

He bragged about it, and turned the con- 
versation to stock raising in order to bring 
it in. 

He had time to repent. That pig had not 
been appreciated. Vulgar minds had only 
regarded his perishable flesh, and kept him 
pent up, neglectful of his higher instincts. 
Now he was allowed to curl his tail over his 
back, and show the precocious daring of an 
original investigator in the natural sciences. 
As a horticulturist he was of the radical school, 
but, with a catholicity of spirit worthy of the 
philosopher, he pushed his researches into all 
branches that bore fruit. Cauliflower and 
columbine were alike gone into ; and he left no 
subject until he had gotten to its roots, and 
digested them fully. 

After investigation of some forty or fifty 
dollars' worth of rare exotics, a paling fence 
divided the front and back premises. This 
gave quite a new interest in life to the pig and 
the family. Often between the heads of his 
discourse the question of the pig's probable 
presence in the front yard crossed the preach- 
er's mind. If it rendered the sermon some- 
what desultory and disconnected, it schooled 
him in processes of carrying on two trains of 
thought simultaneously. Sometimes he was 
distracted by mental debate over the feasi- 
bility of climbing the fence, on his return home, 
in preference to opening the gate, at hazard 
of having the pig run between his legs, as was 
sometimes its habit of afternoon. It would. 



100 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

cause him to give a troubled look to the pew 
where his daughter sat with Mr. George 
Shanklin, in devout attention, and perhaps 
suggest the tactics of allowing the young 
people to precede him — a sort of offering up 
of his children to that Moloch of a pig. In 
charity to such evil-minded promptings, let 
it be said that Mr. Shanklin and his daughter 
exhibited the most complete indifference upon 
the subject, as if unconscious of the existence 
of such a creature; or if the animal, by a spirit 
of diligent inquiry, did force itself upon at- 
tention, the young gentleman contented himself 
with compliments to its owner upon its fine 
condition. It comforted the father to discover 
such reckless courage in one so young, but it 
did not hurt the pig. 

Denied the prospect of the front yard the 
animal gave way to no vain repining, but 
cultivated a talent for opening gates and doors. 
The statement of a neighboring tenant that it 
learned to climb a tree, in order to rob an 
apple orchard, lacks confirmation in its details. 
But it could insert its tough membranous 
rooter under a door, like a hand, and by lever- 
age of neck and shoulders throw the valve off 
latch, and proceed to investigate the dough tray 
or pan of rusk, left to rise against the close of 
service. Sometimes it was the pantry; and 
its investigations included the consumptive 
and digestive labor of weeks in a single after- 
noon — so thrifty is a wise economy in house- 
bold affairs. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 101 

As this intelligent animal grew in size and 
spirit, it comprehended the Shakespearean 
adage, " Home-keeping youth hath ever 
homely wit," and declined to limit its faculties. 
If a neighbor ventured to set a' pail of slops 
for the evening cow, this sagacious animal 
threw its nose in the air, grunted, and, by 
gate, lane, and across lots, proceeded to in- 
vestigate. It was equally unerring on a 
potato hill, and invariably turned up in the 
right place, until its impartial investigations 
left a general appearance of ploughed ground. 
Indeed, it threatened to create a village 
famine; for though it could not climb a tree, 
it was currently charged with shaking down 
the fruit; and no gate, fence, or hedge could 
stay its active industry, no cunning secreting 
foil its elaborate research. The fame of so 
enterprising and sagacious an animal spread 
far and wide, and came back to its happy 
possessor in the shape of various shaken 
heads and fists. 

The good gentleman began to be timid, 
and not easy in mind about his sacred duties — 
terribly embarrassed in his exhortations to 
penitence and amendment. How could he 
preach, the divine law of returning good for 
evil, when it seemed like asking perpetual 
license for the ravages of that terrible, im- 
penitent pig.^ How could he speak to the 
widow of resignation to the Divine will, or the 
particular way in which widows may take 
comfort, when he felt that a whole neighbor- 



102 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

hood described him to her as " a man as fat's 
his hogs off'n other folks' garden sass " ? He 
knew they did, for — et tu. Brute — the very 
neighbor who had given him that frightful 
beast had addressed those very words to him 
that forenoon. As you take the fair Esmeralda 
by the hand, and look into her divine 
eyes, just fancy that she has that char- 
acter of you strictly defined in her mind, 
and then go on with your pretty talk if you 
can. 

This explains that curious reluctance of 
which Tom Gwynn had complained. Soon 
after, I was called into the case. Not by 
Mr. Bland — in whom was the stubborn 
blood of the martyrs, or rather the stoic 
spirit of the American Indian that dies and 
makes no sign — but by the widow. She 
was sure something preyed on his mind. 
She had asked Estella, but the young lady 
had interests of her own that occupied her 
entirely. Mr. Bland had not been at Dun- 
hopen for a month. Would I see him, and 
try to draw him out, and say how glad Mrs. 
Griffin would be to see him, etc. ? 

Love is, I believe, much like the whooping- 
cough or measles, that passes lightly over the 
young, who are liable to a second or seventy- 
second attack; but as we get older our less 
flexible organization quivers with it; it en- 
rheums the eyes, shakes the larynx and vocal 
organs, and hangs on desperately. The widow 
had my entire sympathy. She was forty, and 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 103 

did not look thirty; and her daughter Lucy — 
Of course I was interested. 

But I was like a physician who has not 
the confidence of his patient, nor a single 
symptom by which to diagnose the case. He 
gave a sickly smile and blush at my message 
from the pretty widow at Dunhopen, and said 
he was physically well, and would call to 
relieve Mrs. Griffin's friendly anxiety. 

But he failed to do so. He had begun to 
be superstitious about the hog. He would 
hear of ravages committed by that ubiquitous 
animal at opposite extremities of the village 
at the very time when he had the rational 
evidence of his own sense that it had broken 
into his storeroom and made havoc of his 
provisions. 

He had not butchered the brute, partly 
because it was too much fresh meat for his 
little family, and partly because he was city 
bred, and thought it a proper and creditable 
thing to raise and cure his own meat, like a 
country gentleman. Had he been country 
bred, he would have thought little of such 
economy; but it is a confession of our poor 
humanity to think other lives finer than our 
own, and try to imitate them. 

In the mean while the situation of the widow 
in her straitened garrison was becoming really 
desperate. Tom Gwynn had not exaggerated 
in speaking of it as a Sabine marriage. As 
the reader may be incredulous about the ability 
to entrap a middle-aged, discreet lady having 



104 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

a contrary preference into a match against 
her will, it may be better to give the exact 
detail, as explained later by my old chum, 
Tim Griffin, who was then in Europe, and 
confirmed by his sister Lucy, and Nelly Gwynn. 

Sally Sampson was a sharp, energetic little 
woman, of sandy hair and complexion, and 
gray eyes, in one of which was a brown or 
chestnut spot as large as a pin's head, as if that 
color had splashed into the iris. 

Mrs. Griffin had been drifting, by a series 
of civilities, into a sort of forced confidence 
with her sister in law and her confederate. 
The three were in the sitting-room at Dun- 
hopen, the ladies having some pretense of 
needlework, and Mr. Newsants sitting, with 
that croupier's face on him, watching the 
game, when Mrs. Sally made her great coup, 

" Now, Mr. Newsants," said she, "Emma and 
I have been talking business; and there is a 
matter in which Emma is directly interested, on 
on which we want your candid opinion." 

The croupier is politely willing to explain 
the rules of the game. Mrs. Griffin is in a 
flutter, as if asked to stake down on the 
double zero. She looks to the door, as if 
meditating flight: but there are her guests. 

'* Now about those wild lands, Mr. New- 
sants. Will you please to explain that.?" 
continues Mrs. Sally. 

" Certainly, madam; " and he turns and 
explains in a clear and incisive way to the 
widow. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 105 

" The original investment was a very pru- 
dent one; the lands were bought in at a nominal 
rate at one dollar and a quarter. Colonel 
GrifRn had them examined by an expert, and 
they developed coal and iron. He might have 
sold to advantage then. He did better. He 
fostered a railroad enterprise through them; 
the lands have gone up cent per cent. But 
they have reached the maximum. The object 
of the investment is accomplished. Had 
Colonel Griffin lived, he would have reahzed; 
that remains to be done and should be done 
at once, while the securities are steady." 

" What I Hke about Mr. Newsants is, he 
is so clear and impartial," interpreted the 
chorus. *' Now, sir, what do you think 
about Emma's future ? She can't stay in this 
poky place among idle, insolent blacks." 

'* It is not necessary," responded he. '* With 
capital from these wild lands, and the sale of 
her Southern plantation and slaves on account 
of the unsettled poHtical condition of the South, 
her income will exceed her expenditure. 
Especially, on Miss Lucy's account, invest- 
ments should be such as to relieve her mother 
of care, that she might take personal charge 
of the young lady." 

" Just what I told Emma," interrupted 
Mrs. Sally. '' Will you sacrifice your children 
for this poky place and its lazy blacks ? And 
there's Timothy! Must he come home from 
the court of St. Jeemes's and the Tooleries 
to that sort of thing! " 



106 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

" Under the arrangements, Mr. Tim Griffin 
can exercise his own pleasure," said the 
croupier. " His mother's investments in pork 
and tobacco will enable her to make his allow- 
ance very ample." 

" Now that is what I call considerate," 
said Mrs. Sally, stealing her arm about the 
widow as she closed the trap. " Every true 
mother must think of those dear ones first; 
and it is noble and like Mr. Newsants to think 
of them and make that so clear. But now, 
Mr. Newsants, about Emma herself. She 
can't manage things : she must have some one 
she can trust. You understand me — some 
honorable, upright man of established business 
character, that her family knows and trusts, 
in order to her perfect security. Robert Miller 
will never consent to less than that, for dear 
Emma's sake." 

As he made the final cou]), the gamester's 
face was as cold and impassive as ever, but a 
shade paler; for the stake in the widow's 
hands might touch a quarter of a million. 
He spoke, however, in the same cool, incisive 
tone: " I shall be very happy to devote myself 
to Mrs. Griffin and her interests entirely. I 
shall see that her tastes and preferences are 
consulted, and her intentions about the chil- 
dren and the disposal of her property shall 
remain as completely in her own hands as 
in her widowhood. I shall be satisfied to have 
secured her person and happiness by the 
arrangement." 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 107 

" I am sure," hesitated the widow, not 
a Httle puzzled by this courtship of the third 
person singular, and not seeing, for her part, 
what she was to say, or what it all meant — 
" I am sure you are very obliging; and Tim 
and Lucy, and perhaps " 

" Perhaps they should be informed," in- 
terrupted Mrs. Sally, stringing these fragments 
on a meaning of her own. ''You dear Em! 
How prettily embarrassed! Mr. Newsants 
ought to be a very happy man." At which 
the widow looked down, blushing, more scared 
and embarrassed than ever; and Mrs. Sally 
fell to kissing her, as if that feature of the 
queer courtship must be done by proxy too. 

" But," she added, " I just knew you two 
would suit; and I am so glad it has turned out 
so well." After which she kept up such a 
rattle as to leave the widow no time for re- 
monstrance or reflection, until Mr. Newsants 
took his hat, and with a stiff bow relieved her 
of his presence. He had seemed the same 
impassive watcher of the game; but out of 
doors he stopped and breathed short, as if 
he had been running. 

"Your brother will be so glad!" began 
her sister in law. 

" But, Sally " interrupted the 

widow. 

" Of course he'll call to-morrow " 

"But, Sally " repeated the widow. 

" — and see vou alone," said Mrs. 
Sally, 



108 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

" But I don't want to see him," cried the 
widow. '* I want you to see him, and say 



" Indeed, I'll do no such thing," said Mrs. 
Sally, who knew very well the widow wanted 
to revoke, but lacked the courage; '' and now 
I am going to write your brother all about it." 

Left to herself, the widow became frantic 
with apprehension of being married, in spite 
of herself, to the wrong man. I got a civil 
note requesting me to ask Rev. Mr. Bland to 
call, and a second missive went to Gwynn's. 
It did not find Tom Gwynn, but it found the 
only match for Mrs. Sally Sampson the coun- 
tryside afforded — Nelly Gwynn. The strat- 
egy of that young heroine, however, has noth- 
ing to do with the Rev. Mr. Bland's experiences. 
He was sufficiently moved by this second 
request to order that the hog should be 
butchered; that is, he sent for an expert to do 
execution. 

It only led to another disappointment. 
The expert in this business was a shifty, tricky 
old rogue, who lived somewhere up in Break- 
neck Gap, known as Old Joe Bumponlog. 
Indeed, I find so much to admire in old Joe, 
I wonder I did not choose him for my hero 
rather than the Chester White. Everything 
that came to old Joe was a trade. If a cow 
strayed into his bunch of cattle, he explained 
that he had got her in trade. If an owner set 
up an adverse claim, he was required to 
identify the animal in beef; for old John had her 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 109 

hide at the tan-yard in about the time it took 
to take off his own ragged coat. Old Joe never 
broke into houses, or waylaid travelers on the 
highway; and he could barely write his own 
name, much less forge another's. He just 
traded — mostly in cows or beef cattle, though 
he might deal a little in horseflesh, or even 
poultry, if it came in his way. 

He w^as always to be seen on the poor old 
sore-backed horse, with a ragged flap saddle, 
or driving a rickety old wagon with splints 
out of the sides, and a bit of broken plank for 
a tailboard. He would stop in the road to 
pick up a horseshoe or a bit of bridle, which he 
threw into the " kyart." Nor, to be candid, 
was this thrift restricted to the highway. He 
could do the same in your barnyard, content 
even with waifs of more value, which he 
" 'lowed warn't no use to nobody, nohow." 

In season, he borrowed ploughs and hoes 
and rakes, and kept them, by that curious 
function of trade. He would have borrowed a 
steam locomotive, if he could have found a 
lender, and converted it into irrecognizable 
value, by way of trade. He was much about 
the court house, and could tell shrewd stories 
of lawyers and judges, if he would; but these 
experiences he was a little shy of revealing. 

Old Joe had his weakness; he soaked. 
That is the local definition. He carried a 
flat green glass flask of the vilest distillation 
in a ragged pocket, of which he partook raw, 
without any vanities of water or ice, as he 



110 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

jogged along on his poor old jade. At times 
this habit got the better of him, and he lay 
snoozing in the mud, while the old horse 
picked grass at the roadside, but never offered 
to leave him. They were very much alike, old 
Joe and the sore-backed horse. These slips 
were not common. Generally he soaked and 
kept his wits, picking up odd, out of the way 
theories, which, by some mental process, 
he appropriated to himself, as if he had got 
them in trade. It often surprised strangers, 
and even old acquaintances, how much there 
was in that muddled old head. He had 
theories of sowing and ploughing and har- 
vesting and butchering and pruning and 
transplanting, and the weather and the moon, 
and the power of yarbs, in which, indeed, he 
was quite a pharmacopoeia, and made you 
think he might have been something if he 
liked, only he didn't, except to be old Joe. 
But at all times, drunk or sober, he was the 
same sly, unscrupulous, but not unkindly or 
ill-natured old Ishmaelite. His existence had 
become a habit, if not a necessity, to the 
neighborhood. He could physic a dog, take 
the hooks out of a horse's eyes, or cure gland- 
ers. He could make rabbit traps and part- 
ridge nets, and his clumsy old fingers could 
manage a salmon-fly that seemed bewitched, 
it was so lucky. Besides all these, he was the 
neighborhood butcher, by which your Southern 
readers understand the one who undertakes to 
supply fresh meat, and does not do it. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 111 

To be entirely consistent, old Joe did not 
come as he had promised; but Mr. Bland 
was in earnest by this time, and renewed his 
application until the slinking old pariah was 
brought to book. Old Joe stopped and looked 
at the brute, with his elbows in his ragged 
pockets, and the stump of a whipstock pro- 
truding, only to pronounce the hog too young, 
and that the pork would be too green or 
measly; of which the poor victim only under- 
stood it would be highly improper to butcher 
it. 

" Wy, that air's a Chester White," added 
old Joe. ** He ain't got more'n half his size 
yit. Wait a bit; he'll be too big to git in a 
door, an' meat enough to do ye more'n half 
a year." 

About the meat was all very well, but the 
fable that the Chester White could not go 
through any door was a greater miracle than 
any recorded in Mr. Bland's Bible. It did 
not have to lift now; it just brushed the door 
off the hinges, and went grunting indifferently 
through the splinters. It did grow. It swelled 
visibly before his very eyes, like a blown 
bladder. He and his daughter had given up. 
If they heard the hog coming, they snatched 
whatever could be saved, and fled. The 
Chester White had taken the parsonage. 

Good Mr. Bland never forgot it. He 
carried the whole tremendous gross weight 
of the hog on his conscience night and day, 
and yet by no word or sign did he betray, 



112 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

even to his daughter, how cruel the burden 
was, or what subject of meditation so en- 
grossed his thoughts. She could but see the 
change, but she put it down to any cause but 
the right one. A weaker man would have 
complained ; the minister gave no sign. 

It might be too curious a specidation to 
analyze his feelings at this time, but certainly 
they were double. In one was the clear 
commonsense view that regarded the matter 
as certainly annoying, perhaps vexatious, but 
too trifling a concern to entertain serious 
thought over. The other felt the animal 
to be possessed of the evil spirits once assigned 
to such, and sent especially to try him. It did 
try him. He felt that it had tested him in every 
point in which he had felt strong, and he had 
proved fragile as a reed. It rebuked him. He 
began to think he had mistaken his calling. 
There must be something inherently vicious 
in one in whose hand so familiar and harmless 
an animal became so terrible. As to trusting 
himself with a horse, he did not dare think 
of it. One brute was enough. A horse in 
his hands would murder half the village. 

He never forgot it. If he thought of his 
views of the prophecies or of Dunhopen and 
its fair owner once, he thought of the hog a 
thousand times. He felt it always, and went 
about thinking how its ravages had made the 
villagers hate him, and talk ill of him to one 
another. It was not fatal; it was not so kind. 
It was like the itch — something to cause him to 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 113 

be avoided, to be misjudged. It was some- 
thing loathsome that isolated him from kindly 
and familiar nature, and set him apart in a 
kind of moral leprosy, and yet its absurdly 
ridiculously insignificant character deprived 
him even of the vanity of martyrdom. To 
affect it would be equally profane and con- 
temptible. He began to look forward to the 
first frost of hog-killing time like a yellow-fever 
patient in a Southern hospital; and he se- 
cluded himself in the interval. It in no way 
affected his sermons; probably because he 
was unable to compose a sermon at the time; 
but his prayers grew to be the fervent and 
passionate appeals of a broken and contrite 
heart. It was impossible to hear them without 
being strongly, even painfully, moved. The 
suspicion of Phariseeism, peculiar to a pure 
and rigidly exact nature, was all gone. Wise 
and good as he was, he was the humblest, most 
penitent Christian in the congregation. At 
length the frost came, with a cold snap, and 
he sent for old Joe, and old Joe delayed. 
But the preacher would put up with no procras- 
tination in the matter. In rather more cheerful 
frame of mind, he borrowed a neighbor's 
horse, and set out in search of old Joe's 
quarters. 

He lived in a remote corner of Breakneck 
Gap — a rocky ravine that turned a flare 
edge over the hilltops from the village below. 
His cabin stood shouldered against the cliffs 
with Dame Bumponlog's wash kettle at the 



114 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

spring branch in the hollow. He found the 
master of the house sitting on the stoop, and 
opened the subject of his neglect. 

" But ye ain't noticed it's light o' the moon/' 
said old Joe. 

" What has that got to do with hog killing ? " 
asked the preacher. 

" D'ye want the meat all for to run to lard .?" 
was the Socratic rejoinder. 

'' N-no," said Mr. Bland, " certainly not 
that. Why.?" 

*' Less'n ye kill an' cure in dark o' the 
moon, the fat all runs to grease," was the 
sententious reply. 

" I don't understand," said Mr. Bland. 

" The moon does oodles high-larnt men 
dursn't know," said old Joe. " When d'ye 
sot out seedlin's ? " 

" In the spring, I suppose," said Mr. Bland. 

" But what time o' the moon ? " insisted 
old Joe. 

" I don't set them in the moon," said the 
other, quizzically. 

" Ye put 'em out light o' the moon. Long 
sass, light o' the moon; short sass, dark o' the 
moon," said old Joe gravely. 

" There is nothing in Holy Writ or common- 
sense for the opinion," said Mr. Bland. 

" Light, light," insisted the hospitable 
Ishmaelite, as he proceeded to explain. " The 
moon's loaded stone, you'll 'low ? " 

*' Loaded stone!" repeated the puzzled 
divine. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 115 

'' Wot picks up nails an' needles," ex- 
plained old Joe. " Chunks out'n it, airy 
lights, has lit down onto the yea'th, an' 
they're all loaded stones." 

*' Oh, lodestone," said the preacher. 

*' Ay. Loaded stone i' the moon draws 
the water; you'll 'low that.?" insisted the 
philosopher. 

" You mean the tides ? " the minister ven- 
tured to guess. 

*' Yes, sir. An' it draws the sap into the 
tree, and busts out in leaf, an' draws the 
grease outen the fat, ef ye kill light o' the 
moon," said old Joe; and he was going to set 
forth his theory in detail, but Mr. Bland in- 
terrupted him to insist on having the butcher- 
ing done at once. 

" I 'lowed you'd wait tell dark o' the moon," 
said Joe; " but seein' as it is, I'll be down 
to-morrornexday," running it curiously into 
one word. " Ye done got the trough an' 
kettles a'ready ? " 

''Why, no," said the preacher; "but I 
suppose I can borrow." 

*' Well, have the critter penned," said old 
Joe, " agin I get thar an hour by sun." 

Mr. Bland rode off, a little distrustful of 
the penning, but satisfied withal. Then, 
as his spirits rose in prospect of relief, he 
laughed over old Joe's philosophies about 
the moon, and being in high good humor, 
ventured to call on the widow. I do not 
know what passed, only Mrs. Sally found 



116 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

her yielding sister in law suddenly stubborn, 
and like to take the bit in her teeth. In 
desperation, she ventured to work upon the 
widow's superstitious fears through table 
tipping. It caused another urgent message, 
and again Mr. Bland failed to appear. It 
was only the masterly strategy of Nelly Gwynn 
that finally routed the hitherto indomitable 
sister in law. But the reader is more in- 
terested in knowing what new development 
robbed Mr. Bland of his courage in such a 
crisis. 

The household of the preacher were up 
betimes. The hog was lured into a corner by 
cabbage stalks and pot liquor, and duly 
fenced in with rails and beams. The trough 
and kettle were borrowed, and the water 
heated. 

Mr. Bland, in his study, had taken up 
the subject of the prophecies where he had 
left it when this huge incubus bore him down. 
It was a bright, cool, fall day, just right for 
pork butchering, and as he contemplated 
regaining his popularity, he felt his hopes 
and spirits rise. He had borne it all in silence 
and without a murmur. Surely this world 
does not know its martyrs or martyrdoms. 
How the most insignificant trifle may cause 
more settled, continuous wretchedness than 
many great calamities! The crossness of 
a husband, the peevishness of a wife, the pert- 
ness of a girl, or, less than that, some petty 
habit of eating or sleeping — all of these may 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 117 

at some time play the part of the Chester 
White hog, and be the pebble in the shoe 
through all our daily walks. But Mr. Bland 
had borne his cross, and the hour of relief 
had come. He felt as if his nature was swept 
and purified. He took up his theory at that 
point in which, by incontrovertible mathe- 
matic solution, he established an epochral 
identity in the periods of prophetic weeks to 
the equinoctial and solstitial points of the 
Great Year, so to fix the apocalyptic dates 
and periods with a precision and verity never 
before attempted. Love and fame should 
be his future handmaids. At the moment, 
his daughter Estella came tripping into his 
study to say that Mr. Bumponlog had come, 
and wished to see him. He came down 
smiling, in dressing-gown and slippers, with 
a thought of quizzing this same learned 
Theban a little upon his lunacies. 

Old Joe was in shirt sleeves, a great wooden- 
hafted knife in his hand. He spoke first: 
*' You air a high-larnt man; I 'lowed you'd 
better see this here critter you calls a hog." 

What did the fellow mean.? But Mr. 
Bland stiffened his cartilage to resist any 
more humbugging, and followed to the pen. 

" You 'lowed it were a hog," getting over 
into the inclosure, and kicking the lazy brute 
till it grunted and rose to its feet. 

" A hog! " repeated the preacher won- 
dering if the fellow would pronounce it a 
rhinoceros, or the great behemoth itself. 



118 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

lying under the shady trees, whose nose 
pierceth through snares. 

" Yes, hoss," repeated old Joe, ** you 
'lowed it were a hog. But it air a sow, an' 
a brood sow at that. I 'low no man as is a 
Christian, an' a preacher to boot, don't 
'low for to kill a brood sow in litter. Why, 
the meat 'ud be good for nuthin'; an' the 
onnateralness on it! " 

Mr. Bland was far too meek a man to insist. 
'* No, no," he stammered, mechanically, ** not 
if it would hurt the poor thing." 

As old Joe gathered his knives and scrapers, 
Mr. Bland stole back to his upper chamber. 
He heard the rude fellow stop outside and tell 
a villager how the preacher 'lowed for him 
to come an' butcher a brood sow, and the 
two burst into a great shout of laughter. 
It would be all over town in ten minutes, 
all over the country in a day. He would not 
dare leave home. He was completely wrecked. 
As we have suggested, it seemed to him too 
foolish a thing to pray about, too absurd to ask 
sympathy in; but as he realized the repro- 
duction of such a creature, a sort of super- 
stitious dread seized him. They would uproot 
the village. It would cause him to be dis- 
missed from the Conference, and driven into 
the desert! 

Through it all he knew this misery was 
utterly absurd ; that he should pay no attention 
to it; that no sincere man respected him less 
because he was burdened with a troublesome 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 119 

animal. Instead of relieving, it quickened 
his misery to know it was absurd, extravagant, 
and that he ought to shift it off, for he knew 
by repeated trial that it stuck close as a cuta- 
neous eruption that must run its course. 
Before we condemn his weakness, let us 
study some of our own petty troubles — habits 
that have grown upon us that we ought to 
shake off, and yet which we know have 
stuck to us, and grown stronger for years in 
spite of every resolution to rid ourselves of 
them. 

The next report was that Rev. Mr. Bland 
was seriously unwell, and could not preach 
the following Sunday. I called, and was 
admitted to his study. He was sitting at 
a table in dressing-gown and slippers. He 
received me in a grave, quiet way, and when 
I asked for his health, he hesitated, and said 
he believed it was much as usual. After a 
pause, he added, " I am thinking of resigning 
the ministry." 

I was thunderstruck. I had never met 
any one who so completely filled my ideal 
of the minister indeed. I hastily asked the 
reason for his strange resolution. 

" The apparent cause," said he, " would 
appear too insignificant; but it is not that. 
He has His way of trying us by means that 
seem to our fallible judgment wholly inad- 
equate; but they serve — they serve His 
purpose. He has tried me severelv. I have 
found myself deficient, sadly deficient, in all 



120 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

those things which become the gospel teacher. 
I pray, William, that you may be spared the 
bitterness of finding, after years of experience 
in error, that you have mistaken your calling; " 
and he leaned his head on his hand, and 
seemed profoundly moved. I could not speak 
from sympathy. 

At the moment there was a touch at the 
door, and the widow Griffin entered with 
a salver and napkin. She removed the latter, 
and showed a dish of delicious curds, and a 
pitcher of thick sweet cream. 

" 'Stella told me you were not taking any- 
thing to eat," she said. " I know you were 
fond of this; and you must eat it, for I made 
it with my own hands." 

He thanked her, and looked at her ear- 
nestly. It made her blush and hesitate. 
To cover her confusion, she went on: "I 
have taken another liberty. 'Stella was much 
annoyed by a hog you have in this little yard. 
I made Ben take it in the wagon out to Dun- 
hopen." 

" Ma'am! " said he, starting up. 

"But," said the frightened widow, '* he 
can bring it back when you are well. 'Stella 
told me you prized it very highly. It shall 
be taken care of, or brought back, if you wish." 

" No, no, thank you — that is, do as you 
please. I beg pardon." He was very much 
agitated. He walked up and down, stopped 
at the dish of curds, and tasted it, and then 
turned to the wondering woman, '' I beg 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH Ul 

your pardon. I believe — I am sure — you 
have saved my life, or at least my reason. 

If the devotion of a whole life " 

I don't know exactly what followed, for 
I got an impression that there was one person 
too many in the room, and could not resist 
a suggestion that it was myself. But Rev. 
Mr. Bland did not resign the ministry — at 
least not at that time — and he did marry 
the widow Griffin. 



A WESTERN SEERESS 

TWO minds are said to be en rapport 
when one reflects the other, independ- 
ently of any artificial method of com- 
munication, as the shadow in the pool reflects 
surrounding objects. The process is ana- 
logous to telegraphy, the brain being the 
instrument, the consciousness the operator 
or reader; and it requires, as in that physico- 
mechanical art, two instruments — one to 
originate the impression, the other to receive 
it. In the cant phrase of the day it is called 
clairvoyance, while it was known formerly 
as second sight and by various other names. 
The subject has received a fillip lately from 
Mr. Brow^n's exhibitions of some curious 
phenomena of thought-reading. The similar 
exhibitions of biologists, mesmerists, and 
spiritualists are more familiar, and are gen- 
erally explicable under the broad philosophy of 
humbug. But daily experience furnishes an 
example quite as striking and far more 
reliable. A casual remark elicits the sur- 
prised rejoinder, " Why, I was just thinking 
of that! " although no previous subject or 
circumstance has led up to it. Such a coin- 
cidence may, it is true, be purely accidental, 
the range of ordinary thought, like the 
vocabulary of ordinary speech, being very 

123 



124 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

limited. But the equation of chances shows 
that the concurrence should be infrequent, 
while, in point of fact, it occurs not once, but 
many times, in every man's experience. A 
French philosopher seeks to explain such 
phenomena by laying down this proposition: 
*' Minds in habitual collision acquire a duality 
of action, by which the sensorium receives 
reciprocal impressions, independently of com- 
munication through speech or sign." That 
this explanation is sufficient I shall not under- 
take to affirm: I merely cite it as the simplest, 
and because the simplest the most probable, 
elucidation of the mystery. The reports of 
Mr. Brown's exhibitions speak of a light that 
guides the medium to a concealed object. It 
might be invidious to deny this statement, but 
it is right to point out that this extraordinary 
piece of stage furniture introduces a second 
miracle, greater than the first — the appear- 
ance, namely, of a third intelligence, the 
light, with power to discriminate, and, more 
extraordinary, to affect peculiarly the optic 
nerve. Now, we can readily believe that a 
sleeper or a blind man will become gradually 
and indefinably conscious of an alien presence. 
A like curious sensibility is exhibited by a 
blinded bat set free in a room crossed with 
wires; the bat will never fly against the wires. 
The sleeper, the blind man, or the bat may 
have a general consciousness of something 
foreign, but it is too much to ask us to believe 
that the object is perceived. I do not wish 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 125 

to bring upon myself the censure of the 
mediums and clairvoyants, as well as my 
friends, the Spiritualists, for thus disposing 
of that ghostly presence, the intelligent light, 
although, frankly, I see a difficulty in the 
existence here of a disembodied spirit deprived 
of the peculiar and extremely complicated 
machinery essential to protracted existence 
at the bottom of the encompassing atmos- 
pheric sea. I confess I am not versed in 
ghostly anatomy; but I think, subject to cor- 
rection, that the spirits would get drowned. 
That is the practical way of putting it. 

After the first difficulty of communicating 
without the aid of arbitrary sound or sign 
is removed, the obstacle of distance appears 
to be illusory. There is no reason, apparently, 
why areas of space should affect the process 
more than in telegraphy. The current may 
pass and repass as generously, obeying a law 
of equilibrium in the minds affected. Of 
this we have many historic examples. Plu- 
tarch tells us that in the time of Domitian 
the report of a battle in Germany was pubhshed 
in Rome on the same day in which it was 
fought. Pope Honorius performed the funeral 
obsequies of Philip Augustus of France the 
very day on which the king died. Froissart 
relates how the Count de Foix was aware of 
the defeat of John of Castile the day on which 
it took place, " Saturday, the feast of Our 
Lady, in August, 1385." I take the brief 
account from the quaint old chronicler: " The 



126 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

whole days of Sunday, Monday, and the fol- 
lowing Tuesday he was in his castle of Orthes, 
and made such poor and melancholy meals 
that not one word could be drawn from him; 
nor would he during that time quit his cham- 
ber or speak to knight or squire, however 
nearly related by blood, unless he had sent 
for him; and it also happened that he even 
sent for some to whom he never opened his 
lips during these three days. On Tuesday, 
in the evening, he called his brother Arnold 
William, and said to him, in a low voice, 
' Our people have had a desperate battle, 
which has vexed me very much, for it has 
happened to them just as I foretold at their 
departure.' Arnold William, who was a wise 
man and a prudent knight, well acquainted 
w^ith the temper of his brother, was silent. 
The count, anxious to cheer up his courage, 
for he had too long nourished in his breast this 
sad news, added: ' By God, Sir Arnold! it 
is just as I have told you; and very soon we 
shall have news of it. Never has the country 
of Beam suffered so severely these hundred 
years past as it has now in Portugal.' Many 
knights and squires who were present and 
heard the words of the count were afraid to 
speak, but commented within themselves 
on them. 

'' Within ten days the truth was known 
from those who had been in the battle, and 
they jfirst told the count and all who wished 
to hear them everything relative to their 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 127 

disputes with the CastiKans and the event 
of the battle of Aljubarota. . . . ' Holy 
Mary ! ' said I to the squire, * how was it 
possible for the count to know, or even to 
guess at it, on the morrow after it happened ? ' " 

A still more striking illustration of the 
phrenography of one mind on the sensitive 
electro plate of another occurs in Hugh Millar's 
early reminiscences. His father was lost in a 
storm off Peterhead, on the 10th of November, 
1807. A letter had been received from him 
on the 9th, and in the evening of the follow- 
ing day the cottage door being unfastened, 
Hugh, then a child of five years, was sent to 
shut it. " Day," he writes, " had not wholly 
disappeared, but was fast posting into night. 
Within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly 
as ever I saw anything, was a dissevered hand 
and arm stretched toward me. Hand and 
arm were apparently those of a female; 
they bore a Hvid and sodden appearance; and, 
directly fronting me, where the body ought to 
have been, there was only blank, transparent 
space, through which I could see the dim form 
of the objects beyond. I was fearfully startled." 

It will be observed that it is not the father's 
form which appears; but his mind, looking 
out in that ghastly night and storm, among the 
whirHng elements and toothUke crags of 
Cromarty Bay and headland, is reflected in 
the child's, and brought out more vividly in the 
chiaroscuro of the twilight. The black storm, 
hideous night, and bellowing sea are vague 



us SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

concomitants, but more intense and vivid 
in the father's mind is the drowning woman's 
outstretched arm and hand, and this image 
lays its print upon the sensitive brain of the 
child. I do not think the fact explicable in 
any other way. To treat Hugh Millar's 
statement wdth scornful incredulity merely 
suggests the weakness of the scientist. 

It is worthy of remark that perils of the sea 
appear to excite this sensitiveness in a peculiar 
degree. An instance is mentioned by Dr. 
Conolly, in which the condition last illustrated 
was reversed. A gentleman in danger of 
wreck on the Eddystone rocks actually saw 
his family, according to his subsequent state- 
ment, at the moment of extreme peril. In this 
case we may suppose that his mind received 
an impression from that of some member of 
his household. 

The same principle will serve to explain 
the coincident dreams cited in wonderbooks 
of spiritual science. Such is the case quoted 
on the authority of Mr. Joseph Taylor. A 
youth at an academy dreamed that he had 
returned home, tried the front door, and, 
finding it locked, entered by the back way. 
Going to his parents' room, he said, " Mother, 
I am going on a long journey, and am come 
to bid you good by." To which she replied, 
** Oh, my son, thou art dead." He instantly 
woke, and thought it a dream. But a letter 
from home, in due time, inquired anxiously 
about his health, relating a corresponding 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH U9 

dream of the mother, the appearance of her 
son, his remark, and her ejaculation of grief 
and alarm, precisely as in the boy's vision. 
Dr. Abercrombie says: " This singular dream 
must have originated in a strong, simultaneous 
impression on both minds, and it would be 
curious to trace its cause." But on the theory 
of sympathetic phrenography it is no more 
curious than that two friends should concur 
simultaneously in thought. The original 
dream was possibly in the son's mind, and 
reflected on the sensitive brain of the mother 
till the excited response, in a return wave, 
produced an impression on the son, and, 
breaking the chain of thought abruptly, 
caused him to awake. 

The prophecy of future events would seem 
to demand a different hypothesis. In the 
former examples the subjective mind received 
only an impression of what was actually 
existing as a thought in the corresponding 
brain. But as events of the future exist only 
in speculation, the visions are mere guesses, 
having no foundation in fact. Yet cases may 
occur of an apparently prophetic character 
which are explicable in the same way as those 
of ordinary clairvoyance. One is cited by 
Mr. Owen in his last interesting work on 
Spiritualism. A gentleman designing to make 
certain purchases selects in his mind the 
dealer, price, and wares. This magnetic 
influence — I use the term for want of one of 
known accuracy — goes out, anticipatory, to 



130 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

the unconscious, sleeping mind of the shop- 
keeper. He knows from it that at a certain 
hour a stranger intends to come and purchase 
of his stock. When this is verified the 
dream assumes all the attributes of a prophecy, 
but had the purchaser previously expressed 
his intention, as, in fact, phrenographically, 
though not in speech, he did, there would 
have been no mystery beyond that of the mode 
of communication. And in regard to this we 
are surprised, not to learn that there is a certain 
sympathetic mood of communication — for 
that, in a very limited sense, may be familiar — 
but at the extent and manner in which it is 
developed. It would be too curious to ascribe 
to accidental collisions in the magnetic gang- 
lion of the cerebro-nervous system of the nat- 
ural world the hideous Minotaurs engendered 
in gross minds, and sent buccaneering on the 
chaste seas of sleep, but it may avail to explain 
certain mysteries of literary composition. 
Phrases, apt illustration, nuggets of prose 
and verse fall from the pen, not as crude ore 
refined in the crucibles of thought, but coming 
ready made and fashioned to the text. Thus 
fruits gathered from our own garden wall 
prove at last to be our neighbor's apples which 
overhung the fence. As certain poetlings 
are now at loggerheads over a question of 
offspring, I tender this explication of a sym- 
pathetic co-origin in lieu of a decision like 
that of Solomon, which would give a separate 
half to each claimant. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 131 

It has been proposed to consider the sym- 
pathetic-nervous condition as a sixth sense. 
This theory might throw Hght on the present 
subject, besides suggesting a solution of the 
curious question of communication between 
the lower animals. More than that: we shall 
have reached a faculty bearing the same 
relation to language that speech bears to the 
art of writing. It does seem that the natural 
power of communication should rest on some 
wider basis than a mere convention to 
accept certain signs as the expression of 
thought. 

An interest in the subject, apart from the 
art of woven paces and waving hands, has 
been revived in the writer's mind by the re- 
lation of certain evidences of this sympathetic 
power which occurred in a respectable family 
in Bourbon County, Kentucky, between forty 
and fifty years ago. The person who dis- 
played this peculiar gift was Mrs. Elizabeth 
Basey, and the facts are reported and firmly 
believed by a large circle of direct and colla- 
teral descendants. " Aunt Betty " was of 
the strong old pioneer blood, of a perfectly 
healthy habit and a certain brisk certitude in 
her family aft'airs, and as free from any morbid 
tendencies as could well be conceived. This 
contradicts the modern mesmerist's usual 
choice of a medium, but corresponds with the 
ancient Greek's description of persons thus 
endowed, as possessing " graceful features, 
unblemished body, quick wit, and fluent 



132 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

speech."* These quaUties the good dame 
had; and the impHcit faith with which her 
visions were received will appear from the 
incidents to be related, which may serve also 
to recall the manners of a bygone time. 

It was a raw winter night. Avalanches of 
sleet swept down the gorges, and the wind 
scuffled about the hilltops like Jacob wrestling 
with the angel. Aunt Betty sat in the jowl of 
the chimney, the big log fire sparkling in spits 
of snow, and her busy needles twinkling like 
cold fires over the big yarn stocking. Now 
she pushed the jar of souring cream nearer the 
heat, and now stirred the logs till a river of 
sparks rushed up the broad vent. Her eldest 
son, the farmer, sat opposite, reading. Sud- 
denly the knitting dropped in her lap. 

*' George," she said, " you must ride to W . 

Your brother and his friends have got into 
trouble, and they have shot a man — an 
officer of some sort — among them." As 
promptly as if in answer to a modern tele- 
graphic despatch the young man mounted and 
faced the night, heavy clay roads and rocky 
fells, in a sweeping gallop. The sheriff had 
been killed, and young Basey, in danger of 
being arrested as accessory or as witness 
against his friend, had gone into hiding. A 
few weeks later Aunt Betty roused the family 
with tears and lamentations. The fugitive 
was dying of disease contracted by exposure. 
He did die before any of the family could 

*Apuleius' " Discourse on Magic." 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 133 

reach him, although the attempt was 
made. 

The cotton gin had not at that time ciys- 
taUized slavery into a system; increase of 
slaves, like the filling of the poor man's 
quiver, was a present expense certain, against 
a contingent benefit hereafter; and the duty 
of shifting for themselves fell on the heirs of 
the house as they matured. Two sons of the 
dame had settled in Illinois, but one of them 
had recently returned home to be married. 
The occasion was honored with feast and 
frolic till the poultry yard lay knee deep in sac- 
rificial feathers. The farmhouse, grown from 
a log cabin by gradual accretion, sparkled 
with light from open doors and many dor- 
mer windows cocked over rambling roofs. 
Carriages with steps that let down like a fold 
of muslin, gigs on C-springs which the little 
pink fingers got blue in holding to, wagon- 
cribs of bouncing girls rosy and sweet as 
apples, crowded the road in front, and busied 
the bobbing negroes, alert for a dime. Lemon- 
ade, egg-nogg, a mixture of weeds and whisky 
called a " grass punch," but since renowned 
as mint julep, and buckets of applejack, were 
placed conveniently for the burly farmers, 
who played " old sledge " — for the game in 
which " the knave beats the ace " had not 
yet come in — or locked horns over the bank 
veto, old court and new court, and other 
questions of the day. The supper-room glis- 
tened in old silver, and iced cakes, cooked in 



134 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

the Dutch oven, not made of pasteboard and 
shipped from the pastry cook's for show. 
Dandies in high-collared, short-tailed coats, 
gaiter-cut pantaloons, and pumps, frisked 
with belles in low-necked, short-skirted frocks, 
revealing the neat ankle in clocked stockings 
and crossed shoe-tie, while the monstrous 
shoulder of mutton sleeves gave a Cerberus- 
like appearance to the upper part of the figure. 
Minuet de la cour, quadrille, and Virginia 
reel succeeded each other within ; on the porch 
without the negroes, giggling and jigging, re- 
sponded with shuffling flat feet to the notes 
rasped forth by the deft bow of the fiddler. 

In the midst of this high frolic. Aunt Betty 
felt her absent son thinking eagerly, rapidly, 
desperately with her mind, as with his own. 
She addressed the happy groom in a sharp 
whisper: "That man has shot your brother. 
No, no: your brother has cut him all to 
pieces — all to pieces. You must start for 
Illinois to-night : your wife and I will follow. 
Go — go at once." 

It was certainly an occasion for hesitation. 
Had any doubt been felt, the son would have 
demurred, but there was none. The family 
knew the infallible character of the mother's 
premonitions. In half an hour the bridegroom 
was mounted and on a rapid ride several 
hundred miles to his brother's neighborhood. 

He found the facts to be these: A popular 
man, sturdy, hard headed, but not unkindly, 
had taken deep offence at some word or act 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 135 

of the Kentuckian's, and snapped a pistol at 
him. Instantly he was in the claws of the 
young tiger cat, and fell from his grasp hacked 
and butchered. This was mere justifiable 
homicide; but the times were critical, crime 
frequent, the law inoperative, and society 
had resolutely pronounced, " The next man 
who kills another hangs." The prisoner was 
remanded, rather for his protection than 
punishment, and meanwhile the purpose 
gathered head. Men looked askance at the 
little stockade of a jail: " Perhaps this killing 
was provoked. Likely — it always is. We 
approve of law in a general way, but if the law 
breaks down, then men must do justice them- 
selves." That is the run of the argument at 
such times. I have seen such a body of men 
standing in the face of a drizzly March morn- 
ing over the corpse of a poor, cruelly drowned 
wretch, cold, impassive, resolute. All that 
day on which the bridegroom reached it the 
town was quiet, silent, Sunday like — very 
few persons in the streets or at the tavern bar 
or court house. As he entered the jail, a 
Vigilant said, not unkindly, " His brother, 
hey ? Say to him, if he wants any little thing 
sot, to have it sot now : he won't have no time 
to-night, nor yit to-morrer." 

"Is it that bad, Jerry ? " asked the bride- 
groom,in his ruffles and fine, road-stained cloth. 

" Bad enough, squire. I speak as a friend. 
I wouldn't hurt a fly. Some of us tried, but 
it can't be; it's done sot." 



136 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

He went in; the jailer was roughly polite, 
but would make no assurance of defence. 
''It's just a shell," he said of the jail: *' a 
yoke o' steers 'd pull it all apart." Nor 
would he be bribed. " No, siree; that'll git 
me into it 'stid o' him. Them boys is 'arnest. 
Sorry to say, but it's night, and clean agin 
orders. You must git outen this." 

'' Let me speak to my brother alone. 
You can stand outside the door if you like, 
and lock it. There are some things a 
man wishes to say he does not want over- 
heard." 

" In course, in course," said the jailer, and 
letting him in, closed and locked the door. 
After a while, getting impatient, he called 
out that he " must get a light and inspect! " 

" Never mind," was answered, " I am 
coming; " and then within, " I will tell mother 
and — all you have said. Good by!" and 
the brothers embraced and parted. 

The surly jailer saw the one come out, and 
feeling the soft nap of the broadcloth in the 
dark entry, said, " Now g'long, straight 
forrard; " and the grieving brother plunged 
into the dark, mounted and rode rapidly off. 

" Gwine to the jedge's," commented the 
jailer, listening to the sound of the horse's 
feet. " That cock won't fight." 

No, for no sooner had the rider disappeared 
than the mob, knowing his influence and 
energetic character, proceeded to the 
task. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 137 

" If he has a dozen hours to get his friends 
together, there will be a fight over it," said the 
leader; " we must avoid that." 

Jerry, the ostensible leader and chief exe- 
cutioner, headed the assault; the door was 
sprung ; the passage entered, then the cell. On 
a low settle that served for a bed, his elbows 
on his knees, the palms down, his shoulders 
rounded and his head bent forward, sat the 
prisoner. Two torches drowned out the feeble 
light cast by the poor tallow^ dip on the Bible 
he had been reading. The leader of the mob 
spoke. The prisoner quietly raised his head 
and looked at him calmly, indifferently in the 
face. All heroic things are simple. It was 
the bridegroom brother! 

The mob knew and personally liked him. 
'' Where is your brother.? " 

" Gone," he replied, coolly, apparently 
comparing the toes of his boots. There was 
refreshing strength in his very placidity. 

"Hell! How'dhegitout.?" 

*' Walked out, as I will if you have no use 
for me. 'Tisn't a flowery bed of ease, Jerry, 
as the hymn book says; " and the new Damon 
drew up his tall form and shook himself like 
a horse in his saddle trappings. 

" No, it ain't," said Jerry, reluctant and 
hesitating as he peered ridiculously about. 

" Come, you haven't anything against me," 
said the bridegroom, advancing. *' I got here 
before you, and the bird is flown; that is all; " 
and he walked out. 



138 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

In this case the condition of the clair- 
voyante in the midst of the described gayety 
refutes the theory of the pseudo-Platonists, 
that the bodily senses are closed to external 
objects, as in sleep, while the reflective and 
discursive faculties are still awake and active, 
and the spiritual faculty is excited to the high- 
est state of energy.* Rejecting this fallacious 
division, which assumes to create a difference 
by giving different names to one faculty, we 
arrive at the truth — that only when the 
attention is fixed or excited is the phenomenon 
observed; and this brings it under the common 
law applicable to ordinary perception. 

The relation that follows belongs to that 
history of adventure in the Southwest which 
must one day form a chapter in our national 
annals. 

As early as 1823-24 the commerce with 
Santa Fe, El Paso, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, So- 
nora, and Lower California — a small, trick- 
ling stream that preceded the great freshet 
we all remember — required treaty protection 
from the United States Senate. The trade 
was estimated at a hundred and ninety 
thousand dollars per annum, carried on by 
caravans of eighty or one hundred men, who 
exchanged calicoes, bread, and ammunition 
for furs, mules, and bullion. Gregg estimated 
the product of the placer mines in 1832-33 
at about eighty thousand dollars per annum. 

Smith's •' Bible Dictionary," art. Prophet. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 139 

One of Aunt Betty's brood of pioneers had 
been hunting on the Arkansas, Canadian, and 
South Red rivers, salting, packing, and ship- 
ping the buffalo beef, at Nacogdoches prin- 
cipally. Rumors of gold washings came 
through the fur companies, and the trains of 
pack mules, hardy trappers, and strange 
stories of huge stone cities fired the ardent 
imaginative pioneer blood, and led the youth 
to incur the perils of wild tribes that infested 
the curious natural platform lying beyond the 
Mississippi. That plateau, bounded by the 
ocean, the peaks of Wind River chain and the 
southern isthmus, is the cradle of the Aztecs. 
Fremont's Peak, the boss of a huge buckler, 
rises over an expanse as varied as the symbols 
on Achilles' shield, whose " utmost verge 
a threefold circle bounds." Cis-Mississippi 
is the heir of sunken Atlantis, dowered in its 
wealthy watersheds of primordial rivers, with 
buried mineral (gold) and fertile treasure. 
Trans-Mississippi, if not older, is different in 
its physical history. A great ocean projected 
from the latitude of the Southern Gulf to the 
Arctic, and a wide shallow sea lay west of the 
river line, its bottom a huge metamorphic 
biscuit, slowly cooking and slowly cooling. A 
giant left hand, the finger tips at Santa Fe, 
the shoulder of the thumb at Mexico, the 
hollow of the palm at Chihuahua, was put 
under the cake, lifting it slowly, an inch in a 
thousand years. The plateau made by the 
undulating flattened crest of the Sierra Madre, 



140 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

the true divortium aquarum, retains the hand- 
mark in an elevation of 7,047 feet at Santa Fe, 
7,990 at Mexico, 4,476 at Chihuahua, and a 
gradual slope to the small of the palm at the 
Mississippi. It is the largest plateau in the 
world. The diluvial water running off dur- 
ing the elevation carved out valleys, leaving 
that flat normal surface in huge llanos. Nor 
was the biscuit so carefully handled as not to 
crack in five great ranges; and we may infer 
that a subsidence followed, which brought in 
the water, widening the valleys and cutting 
the sharp bluffs of the llanos in the lower 
strata. Life rushed in and fed the new land 
abundantly. The salt brine seethed, moist- 
ened the grand galvanic plates, and generated 
magnetic electricity, disengaging sulphuretted 
hydrogen, sulphuric ethers, and acids from 
mineral, animal, and vegetable decay. These 
sulphurous elements tainted the biscuit, and, 
giving a new character to the strata, added 
an acrid bitter to the water veins, like nothing 
so much as an excess of soda in bread. This 
soda biscuit is enormous, a series of gypsum 
strata extending from the network of Boggy 
Creek to the Rock of Zuni. 

The topographic features are more the 
work of erosion than upheaval. The normal 
surface is preserved in the tablelands, plated 
with dolomite and containing characteristic 
Inoceramus, Gryphea, Ostrea, Pecten. These 
plains are bounded by sharp bluffs, and where 
they are scattered over the huge slope the 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 141 

view resembles ice-cuttings in the glacial har- 
vest on Northern lakes, slid in huge cakes 
on the smooth, polished, frozen water surface, 
their regular edges glittering with prismal 
white, yellow, and red. The largest of these 
superincumbent tables or cakes is the Llano 
Estacado, or Great American Desert, having 
a thin carpet of grama grass, Tripsacum 
dactyloides . Others lie adjacent in hummocks, 
pyramids, tetons, the writing of the strata 
showing an identity of origin and constitution. 
The diluvial and alluvial of subsidence and 
elevation have left aroyos, or pool-beds, salinas, 
smoking hills and salt lakes. 

This plain of the flattened Mexican Andes, 
like its Asiatic counterpart which cradled the 
Aryan, has controlled great national move- 
ments by its physical character. That the 
Aryan emigrates by parallels of latitude is an 
axiom, but the axiom must be modified to 
isothermal parallels to make it general. The 
Aztec, obeying the same climatic law, crosses 
the plane of Aryan emigration at right angles. 
Following the high, flattened crest of the Mexi- 
can Andes, the star of his empire took its way 
southward, planting its strange, majestic stone 
cities along the Rio del Norte and the Gila 
to the Valley of Mexico and the shores of the 
Pacific. When the huge fabric of that Indian 
civilization in its spread broke by its own 
weight, and crumbled in the strange interne- 
cine strifes of disintegrating peoples, so well 
illustrated in the warring cities of Italy after 



142 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

the fall of Rome, hostile tribes were found 
everywhere, the chase their sport, war their 
passion. The preserved memorial of their 
ancient civilization is in their temple-building, 
modes of interment, fire, or phallic worship, 
and, strange to say, a legal-tender currency 
(shell-money) accepted over a greater spread 
of territory than that over which our green- 
backs prevail. 

With this synoptical view of the physical 
character and history of the country into which 
Aunt Betty's youngest son, the Benjamin of 
her hopes, was pushing his fortunes, we can, 
perhaps, dispense with the usual geographical 
details, which too often convey nothing definite 
to the mind. 

The boy added to his love of adventure the 
fair hopes of a lucrative trade among the 
Pueblos and half-breed Spaniards. Bit calicoes 
brought a dollar; beads, glass trinkets, leaden 
images, at a penny a gross, brought their 
weight in gold-dust; furs, bullion, mules were 
cheap for barter, and the last carried the 
stock back to the settlements and paid all 
expenses. If those at home could judge 
from the mirror of the mother's spirits, the 
journey was exhilarating. At times she said 
that the trading party had set out too late, 
that her son frequently urged them forward, 
but that the party seemed indifferent, and 
delayed for hunting or Indian trade days 
and weeks. Once she spoke of an adventure 
in the snow, and what seemed to be an attack 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 143 

upon a deer-park or fortification made in the 
snow by the bucks against the wolves; but 
the impression was vague and unsatisfactory. 
But there came an evening over her log fire 
in the late autumn when the tears rolled down 
the kind, gray cheeks and shone on the bright 
steel needles. The depression continued for 
days, during which she spoke only at intervals, 
describing what she felt or saw. The reader 
will gather it better from a connected account. 
It was a dark, cloudy evening, the air of 
that moist, mephitic quality that forebodes 
snow or rain. The campers were on a tongue 
that jutted out from a high, level plain, 
against whose abrupt cliffs the black surf of 
mist beat like a heavy atmospheric sea. The 
broad depths of level, sinking in horizontal 
gloom, were broken by the line of a creek 
that wound through a rocky dell under steep, 
overhanging sides, worn in hollow caverns. 
To the view above, it was an irregular crack in 
the plate, in which the black green of cedar 
and pine foliage was obscurely visible. South- 
ward lay the bed of diluvial valleys, with 
island-like pyramids and knots of Cottonwood 
stretching far and wide below. The clouds 
banked the sky in great blue-black welts that 
drew a sharp mural escarpment above the 
horizon. The sun had dropped below that 
black wall, but all above it, and bringing out 
its solid, rocklike embankment, rolled up 
great torrents of angry fire, as if the world 
beyond was burning with intense destructive 



144 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

fury. By degrees, between ascending cloud 
and descending sun, columns of mist, like 
great rolling black smoke, overspread the wall, 
obscured its sharp crest, and hung down like 
huge black sacks of storm. The close, me- 
phitic air was perceptible to Aunt Betty's 
sympathetic nerves as she sat by the great 
log fire. 

But there was an unformed, indefinable 
foreboding in her mind, the reflection of her 
son's apprehension, occasioned by the Indan 
signs seen that day. He knew well that to 
meet Indians on the Plains so late in the 
season meant a desperate battle for food. 

At nightfall the snow came — soft, white, 
illuminating. It saved them: in the open 
plain, now light with that soft, cold, brilliant 
white, the black bodies of the savages were 
plainly visible; but it did not prevent an attack. 
On the contrary, they made one of those 
desperate, energetic, persistent assaults which 
characterize the warfare of the North American 
Indians, the first natural warriors in the 
world. Go where you will — to the African 
Bushmen, Caffres, Bedouin x\rabs, Tartars, 
Kabyles, Otaheitans, Australians — the only sav- 
age that will desperately and perseveringly 
charge and recharge fortifications is the Ameri- 
can Indian. He does not do it often, it is true, 
but he will do it on occasion, and with a fierce in- 
trepidity which no disciplined valor can surpass. 

Such an attack was made now, but the whites 
were prepared and better armed, and fought 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 145 

from the corral as a fortification. The savages 
were bloodily repulsed, and a little after 
midnight disappeared altogether. A discus- 
sion followed as to the possible renewal of 
hostilities, the majority arguing against it. 
Aunt Betty's boy and a Canadian voyageur 
of the party contended that the very despera- 
tion of the first assault indicated a second. 
" The Indians," said the former, " were 
probably starving; the traders' provisions were 
necessary to life." The voyageur referred to a 
desperate attack of the Crows a few years 
before on a stronger party, which had been pro- 
longed and persisted in for days. " These," 
said the leader, " are Kioways or Comanches, 
and not so plucky." 

However, it was thought prudent to wait 
a day and study the country, but events pre- 
vented any exploration. All that night the 
snow fell — not in flurries, but steadily. In 
the morning the whole country was sheeted. 
Aunt Betty's boy probed it: " This snow, 
which saved, will ruin us. We must clear a 
field, or the Indians will attack under a sure 
cover." 

A snow plough is no elaborate work. Holes 
let in the sideboards of the wagon for plough 
handles and thills or gearing, and the machine 
is made. A dozen of these swept the field in a 
frolic. The snow was banked up about the 
corral with salients and lunettes. They had a 
snow-fort, with a clear glacis and open field. 
But still the clouds wove that thick, moist, 



146 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

treacherous cover. It came in great clots 
and wefts, falling heavier and heavier. Any 
plan of exploration to discover the track of the 
Indians was out of the question. They could 
only wait, and as they waited the snow fell. 

" This cursed snow is fighting against us," 
said Aunt Betty's boy. 

*'Who cares.?" said the leader. ''The 
Indians are gone, we have lots of rations; 
let it fight." 

But Aunt Betty's boy did not believe the 
Indians were gone. The Indians were hun- 
gry, and must have food. The snow was 
fighting for the savage, and he was a soldier, 
in his way. The boy measured the new snow 
on the glacis — six inches. By morning it 
would be a foot or eighteen inches. It was 
now nightfall of the second night. When he 
came down after circling the camp the leader 
was nodding at the fire, and all but the sentries 
rolled up in their blankets. The trees and 
umbrage were knolls of snow, the black maw 
of the creek bed was wiped out. It looked 
like one smooth plain above and one below, 
and the jagged cliffs were all rounded and 
softened. 

By and by the sentries came trickling in — 
not to stay, but to warm themselves and 
gossip a little. After a while they returned to 
their posts. Presently they trickled back 
again, and every time more trickled and their 
stay was longer. At last they were all at the 
fire, chewing, smoking, tiring one another 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 147 

with sympathetic yawns and sleepy talk. 
Aunt Betty's boy shifted uneasily, went out, 
and circled the little fort again. He saw no 
signs but one; the snow was ten inches deep, 
and falling like great white cloths, one after 
the other, one after the other — so busy and 
yet so deadly silent. He went to the captain 
and said abruptly, " The snowfall will cover 
an attack now, and it lies over a foot deep. 
The men must be waked and the snow ploughs 
geared up." 

** Bosh! " repeated the sleepy captain, pee- 
vishly. ** Who bosses this ranch ? You are 
scared; go to bed. There aren't no Injuns in 
fifty mile o' here; none ain't been seen for 
twenty hours and more." 

" They will be on us by morning," said 
the boy resolutely, " and in this snow we'll 
have no more chance than a baby in bed. 
Get up and do your duty." 

** D — n my duty ! " said the captain. '* You 
had better mind your own business. ' A 
baby in bed,' indeed! well, go to bed, baby." 
And, having chuckled over that retort, he 
rolled himself up in his blanket and snored. 

The sentries, all lying round the fire, heard 
what was said. The boy turned to them and 
asked, " Will any of you fellows help to gear up 
and clear away the snow ? " 

They looked at one another. " Our watch 
is about out; suppose you try the relief.^" 
was the conclusion. 

When that came the proposal was made. 



148 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

" And why didn't them fellows do it ? " 
growled the relief. " I'll be shot if we do." 

Having settled that, and the posts on the 
glacis being cold, they sat down over the fire 
to a game of " old sledge." 

Then Aunt Betty's boy went to the voy- 
ageur, who had shared his apprehensions. 
The man only said, *' Go away; I am sleepy." 

After that the boy went out again, and re- 
turned. He then led out his horse, wounded 
in the night fight. There was a great sob in 
his throat, for it was a home-bred filly, but he 
blew off his emotion as men and whales do, 
and drew his hunting knife across the poor 
creature's windpipe. She fell with a dull thud. 

" Hello! what are you doing thar. Ken- 
tuck ? " called a voice from the card players. 

" Putting her out of her misery," said 
Kentuck, briefly. 

** And what are you a-butcherin' of her 
for.^" queried the other after a pause. 

'* Shet yer head, Piute," interrupted his 
card partner. *' Don't ye see he's gwine to be 
askinnin' of her.? Play!" 

Aunt Betty's son disappeared. The moist, 
soft dusk of snow and mystery came down 
and enveloped him utterly. The last seen of 
him has been said. How or by what means he 
disappeared from that circle of twenty feet, 
became absorbed in the dense, unutterable 
gloom of nothingness, was unknown. The 
incidents of the battle, of the camp, all the 
details, and more than are given here, were 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 149 

preserved and published. A broad noon 
sun was poured upon every transaction up to 
that point; and then suddenly the boy is 
snatched up from the body of his slaughtered 
horse, and is gone! The subsequent tragedy 
of the camp was known, in much of its detail, 
also; but the fact about Aunt Betty's son, 
Kentuck, was only inferential, and that in- 
ference was — death. Doubted for years by 
those who hoped against hope, and then con- 
firmed by the strong concurrence of every 
absolute test and fact possible, save one. Op- 
posed to this was his mother's single word: 
she felt that her son was not dead. 

A year later a broken, half-wild white, 
thrown from tribe to tribe like a fire bucket 
over a surging mob, told the story of that 
night's disaster. Soon after Kentuck began 
to skin his horse this man had to go out of the 
camp. He asked one and another of his 
friends to accompany him. Busy at their 
cards, all refused. Kentuck made no answer 
at all; he was busy about the horse. The man 
had hardly got beyond the glacis before the 
attack began. The Indians had burrowed 
under the snow, through the soft snow-walls, 
and burst upon them. He could see the 
slaughter from his gloomy hiding, and mark 
the men as they fell. There was no resistance; 
it was butchery. 

The story was published, copied into the 
Kentucky papers — some old men may re- 
member it — and the man was sought out by 



150 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

Aunt Betty's family. He gave the details 
as they are given here, verifying Aunt Betty's 
vision, and explaining parts of it. Asked 
about the fate of her son, he assured them that 
he must have been one of the first victims, 
and that his escape was absolutely an im- 
possibility. He was in the circle of light, 
inevitably seen, and as certainly slain. There 
was hardly a possibility that even one sleeper 
escaped by being away from the light, but no 
possibility for the rest. The evidence was as 
strong as Nature and circumstance could 
make it. 

Yet Aunt Betty persisted that he was not 
dead; she felt that he was alive. For a few 
years this strong faith, in connection with her 
established correctness, affected the incredulity 
of the family. But year after year passed, 
and not a word or a sign came to justify her 
persistent faith. Then the day arrived when 
she must lay down this burden of life. In 
Christian resignation she accepted that, as 
she had accepted all the duties of life and 
fulfilled them. But even in her last hour she 
repeated her assurance that her son was alive. 
If he came back some day, as she believed he 
would, she wished the undying love and bless- 
ing of the dying mother to be given to him. 

The Mexican war and General Kearney's 
expedition opened up that strange country; 
the gold was found in California; adventure 
was quickened. Then, after seventeen years 
of absence, brown, hale, hearty, a fine, middle- 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 151 

aged man, apparently well to do, rode up the 
tanbark road and alighted. It was the long- 
lost son and brother. 

His story of his escape, adventures, and settle- 
ment was a strange one. When he found 
that his companions disregarded his warning, 
he hesitated what to do. His mind was 
divided, one half grieving for the horse and 
all it represented to him, the other eagerly 
searching the void for means of escape. He 
had read or heard of a man's hiding in the 
hollow of a buffalo from the burning prairie — 
an idle story, perhaps, but suggestive. But 
could he get into the cavity after removing 
the entrails ? He would try. He was slender, 
supple, small of his age. The horse was 
disemboweled, and the intestines buried in the 
snow. When it came to the effort, to making 
his bed in that raw, reeking flesh, his sensi- 
bilities revolted. He did not believe it was 
possible, physically or morally. The gap 
was too small, the hollow too horrible. Then 
he heard the warwhoop, and, to use his own 
words, he '* jumped in like it was a church 
door." Over him reeled and staggered that 
short, sharp, bloody massacre; it was done 
almost before he had time to think; and it 
was still dark. The closeness suffocated him, 
the reek and fresh gouts of blood sickened 
and nauseated him. Then came thirst — 
deadly, hot, fierce thirst — licking up the 
blood in his veins with a tongue of fire. He 
could hear the shouts and orgies of the 



152 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

savages, and knew that after plundering they 
were eating, gorging, and maddening them- 
selves on the traders' whisky. One drunken 
savage stumbled over the poor brute, and lay 
snorting, his drunken breath actually filling 
the nostrils of the prisoner a few inches from 
him. Fortunately his companions hauled 
the savage away by the heels, and mad, burnt 
up with fierce, intolerable thirst, Kentuck 
thrust out a hand and gathered the bloody 
snow. How deliciously cool it was! He 
fed his ravenous passion at intervals, and as 
he did so he became conscious of an external 
warmth. The sweat poured from him and 
drenched him, for the vital heat of the poor 
animal had been preserved by the occupant 
of the carcass hours after. 

It was afternoon before the Indians gathered 
the spoils and left, burning what they could not 
carry, for they would not encumber them- 
selves with the wagons. They never do. 
When finally he ventured out, it was night. 
Cooking portions of the horse, and taking as 
much of the flesh as he could carry, he set out 
on the Santa Fe trail. The other fugitive had 
returned to the settlement; the Kentuckian 
went forward, chiefly because the Indians had 
taken the contrary route. 

The details of his subsequent adventure 
must be omitted. He reached Santa Fe, and, 
after knocking about for some months, took 
service with a Spaniard who had been governor 
of the province when under Spanish rule. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 153 

His courage and activity, in contrast with the 
lethargy and unthriftiness of the Pueblo slave 
and half-breed, won him favor; and when 
the Spaniard's pretty daughter returned from 
the convent of Our Lady of Sorrows, she 
shared in her father's partiality. The con- 
clusion tells itself. The young man had 
written, but in the disturbed condition of 
Mexico the letter was lost. At a remote 
hacienda on the Gila there was no opportunity 
to communicate overland. 

In a review of these incidents the question 
asked by the writer will occur to the reader: 
If such a power existed, why was there no 
revelation of the son's affairs in the long in- 
terval, beyond the mere fact of his existence ? 
No satisfactory answer was given, but this 
may be surmised: An acute exciting cause is 
necessary for a well-defined impression, and 
none seems to have occurred in the son's life 
after his escape. Secondly, phrenography 
belongs rather to pictorial representation of 
scenes and ideas than the art of oral or written 
communication. Its analogy is rather to 
photography than telegraphy. Without some 
conscious effort on the part of the son to 
present his thought in a mood to identify his 
location, the discovery would be difficult, if 
not impossible, and the involuntary character 
of the phenomena puts such an experiment 
out of the question. It is curious to remark 
in the close that while the optic nerve is some- 
times sympathetically excited to a high degree. 



154 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

the sense of hearing does not seem to respond 
with equal facility. Yet the masculine and 
vigorous genius of the author of Jane Eyre 
has seized upon the analogy with such force 
and simplicity of application as to cause its 
tacit admission within the possible pale of 
sympathetic communication. 

After all, what mystery is there in it beyond 
the mystery of our daily lives ? It is to our own 
ever-quick, responsive nature we owe all 
knowledge, and the question is less of per- 
ception than interpretation. As parts of one 
grand economy nothing happens foreign to it, 
were we but skilled to read the delicate in- 
strument whose graphic finger is on our pulse 
and brain. 



THE SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 
BOOK II 
POETRY 



THE SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

Written for and dedicated to the Episcopal Church, 
Richmond, Va., A.D., 1866 

A wonderful fable, first told when the earth 

Was glad in its primeval hours. 
While the birds were first trying the carols of 
mirth, 

And the land was so proud of its flowers. 
All the crowns of the stars, as they sparkle, were 
new. 

In the newly spread heaven above. 
Ere life was a struggle to rend and to rue. 

And was perfect in lessons of love. 

Now this wonderful Fable was told in the days. 

When everything bright had a voice 
To sing the unsyllabled anthems of praise. 

To the full, as the angels rejoice; 
And the skies and the seas and the earth and the 
air 

Were the symbols by night and by day. 
Of a love that was perfect in a world that was fair 

And proof against Death and Decay. 

For this glorious fable was spoken to show 

How that God, in each wonderful change, 
Created in recreating below 

All the Good, with economy strange. 
It was told of a bird, like a beautiful dawn, 

Freshly painted with pencils of light. 
When down from the heavens, the curtain is 
drawn 

Of the shadowy glory of Night. 

157 



158 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

Its wings were the symbolized passion of Love, 

Folding close the beloved to the heart ; 
Or in spreading, to rise to his Temple above, 

Where God holds the portals apart. 
At twilight, at morning, by noonday or night, 

It arose from Earth's velvety sod. 
And the people who looked on its wonderful flight 

Felt their souls rise with it up to God. 

This bird, we are told, when its days here below 

Were all gathering fast to the close, 
Plucked twigs of the spicewood and fruit from the 
bough 

And the petals that fall from the rose, 
And heaped them together, with wonderful art, 

In the form of a funeral pyre, 
When folding its wings, on the love-brooding heart. 

It was burned in the odorous fire. 

But more wonderful still, as the story is told. 

From the ashes that sank in perfumes. 
The bird rose again with the purple and gold. 

And the flash of the flame in its plumes ; 
The fire, instinct in its wonderful form, 

Shone out in each feather and line, 
And the breath of the spice and the rose's young 
charm 

Around it swam bravely and fine. 

And still; though the fable's as old as the hills. 

Its lesson can never pass by; 
For every eye brightens and every heart fills 

At the thought that the right cannot die. 
And the Southerners look on the ashes and feel, 

That again, as the fable has shown. 
We shall find in the pyre of fire and steel 

A country and church of our own. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 159 

ADONAIS 

Thammuz came next behind, 
Whose annual wound to Lebanon allured. 
The Syrian damsels, to lament his fate, 
In amorous ditties all a summer's day. — Milton. 

Shall we meet no more, my love, at the binding 
of the sheaves. 
In the happy harvest field as the sun sinks low ? 
When the orchard paths are dim with the drift of 

falling leaves, 
And the reapers sing together, in the mellow, misty 
eves, 
Oh! Happy are the apples when the south 
winds blow. 

Love met us in the orchard, ere the corn had gath- 
ered plume, — 
Oh! Happy are the apples, when the south 
winds blow; 
Sweet as summer days that die when the months 

are in their bloom, 
And the peaks are ripe with sunset like the tassels 
of the broom, 
In the happy harvest fields as the sun sinks low. 

Sweet as summer days that die at the ripening 
of the corn, — 
Oh! Happy are the apples when the south 
winds blow — 
Sweet as lover's fickle oaths, sworn to faithless 

maids forsworn. 
When the musty orchard breathes, like a mellow 
drinking horn, 
Over happy harvest fields as the sun sinks low. 



160 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

Love left us at the dying of the mellow autumn 
eves, 
Oh! Happy are the apples when the south 
wind blows: 
When the skies are rich and fading, as the colors 

of the leaves, 
And the reapers kiss and part, at the binding of 
the sheaves, 
In the happy harvest fields, as the sun sinks low. 

Then the reapers gather home from the gray and 

misty meres. 
Oh! Happy are the apples when the south 

winds blow; 
Then the reapers gather home, and they bear 

upon their spears 
Love, whose face is like the moon's fallen gray 

among the spheres 
With the daylight's blight upon it as the sun 

sinks low. 

Faint as far-off bugles blowing, sweet and low the 
reapers sung. 
Oh! Happy are the apples when the south 
winds blow; 
Sweet as summer in the blood, when the heart is 

ripe and young, 
Love is sweetest in the dying, like the sheaves 
he lies among. 
In the happy harvest fields as the sun sinks low. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 161 
THE STAB 

Of sudden stabs in groves forlorn. — Hood's Eugene Aram. 

On the road, the lonely road, 

Under the cold white moon, 
Under the ragged trees, he strode; 
He whistled, and shifted his heavy load; 

Whistled a foolish tune. 

There was a step timed with his own ; 

A figure that stooped and bowed ; 
A cold white blade that flashed and shone, 
Like a splinter of daylight downward thrown — 

And the moon went behind a cloud. 

But the moon came out, so broad and good, 

The barn cock woke and crowed ; 
Then roughed his feathers in drowsy mood, 
And the brown owl called to his mate in the 

wood. 
That a dead man lay on the road. 



CATALINA'S BETROTHAL 

My lover lived by sea and shore; he sailed the 

Spanish Main — 
Oh! The long round wave comes rolling up 

to shore 
From Port-au-Prince to Barbadoes, and fair 

Cadiz, in Spain. 
Oh! Summer keep your summer seas until he 

comes again. 
For loud the wild winds rave and cry like ghosts 

about the door. 



162 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

We said the Creed to Festa's wont; we danced the 
bolero — 
And the long round wave comes rolling up to 
shore. 
Genita frowns, Pepita pouts, because he loves 

me so; 
He told me so a hundred times, before I let him go, 
For loud the wild winds rave and cry like ghosts 
about the door. 

With purple dyes and scented wood, the ship 
went down the bay, 
And the long round wave came rolling up to 
shore 
As sinks the light below the sea, I saw it sail away 
To bring me silks and Spanish lace against the 
wedding day. 
And loud the wild winds rave and cry like ghosts 
about the door. 

I told the padre how the winds come crying every 

night, 
And the long round wave comes rolling up to 

shore ; 
He gave me three novenas for a southwind low 

and light 
That clothe the silken seas in lace and veils of 

Spanish white. 
But loud the wild winds rave and cry like ghosts 

about the door. 

And all night long Los Nortes came; I heard 
them shriek and cry. 
And the long round wave come rolling up to 
shore ; 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 163 

And fearful things, far out at sea, that neither live 

nor die 
Laid their long wings along the hills and beat the 

sea and sky, 
And loud the wild winds rave and cry like ghosts 

about the door. 

I heard a ship, gun after gun, through all the 

stormy night — 
And the long round wave come rolling up to 

shore; 
And something, like a bird, that comes with breast 

and wings of white. 
To wives of sailors lost at sea, against the window 

light. 
When loud the wild winds rave and cry like 

ghosts about the door. 

I chose the dress he loves the best, the window 
opened wide. 
And the long round wave came rolling up to 
shore; 
I knelt before the crucifix, as if close by his side. 
While something seemed to speak for him, I 
answered like a bride, 
And loud the wild winds rave and cry like ghosts 
about the door. 

I heard the neighbors at the church, through all 

the storm and strife, — 
While the long round wave came rolling up to 

shore ; 
At mass before the uprisen Host who is the Lord 

of Life, 



164 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

I knew He heard the words that made me wedded, 

widowed wife. 
And loud the wild winds rave and cry like ghosts 

about the door. 

And though they frown to hear me say: He sails 

the Spanish Main — 
And the long round wave comes rolling up to 

shore; 
I know my life is like the sea: below its cross of 

pain, 
It keeps its treasures hidden close until he comes 

again, 
And loud the wild winds rave and cry like ghosts 

about the door. 



THE LIGHTHOUSE ROCK 

Over the shingle, and over the main. 

The wave breaks over the I^ighthouse rock; 

A lady there lived ; the beauty of Spain ; 

The South brings sorrow; the West brings rain. 

But the dead can never come back again, 
When the wild sea chickens begin to flock. 

Over the Shingle in Sixty Nine, 

The wave breaks over the Lighthouse rock; 
The sun came out of a bath of wine. 
And the reef was ragged and jagged and bare, 
With a scowl on the sea and a fit in the air. 

And the wild sea chickens began to flock. 

The wind blew East, and the rain was black; — 
fhe wave breaks over the Lighthouse rock; 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 165 

And a ship came in, on the starboard tack. 
But the wind came South and the rain was white, 
And the ship was a spHnter of chips that night, 
Where the wild sea chickens begin to flock. 

Over the shingle and over the sand ; — 

The wave breaks over the Lighthouse rock; 

A corpse took hold of my lady's hand. 

It said, " You have come for your salvage, ma'am; 

The South brings sorrow, and here I am. 
Where the wild sea chickens began to flock.'* 

She made him a shroud of her satin gown, — 
The wave breaks over the Lighthouse rock; 

She brought him in state, into Lighthouse Town; 

This was my husband, cruel and cross. 

The South brings sorrow and Life brings loss. 
When the wild sea chickens begin to flock. 

Over this dead man's ship they passed, — 
The wave breaks over the Lighthouse rock; 

They kindled corpse candles over the mast. 

But the Magdalene Sea, on its christen trough, 

Has scoured my sins and his sorrow off. 
When the wild sea chickens begin to flock. 

He lies like a noble man, brave in the shroud — 

The wave breaks over the Lighthouse rock. 
But the heart within me is glad and proud. 
For this is the salvage I ought to him. 
Of the keeper who lets his lamp burn dim. 
When the wild sea chickens begin to flock. 

For Death brings the dead love back to life — 
The wave breaks over the Lighthouse rock, 



166 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

And I am this dead man's own true wife; 
For the mad sea, sick of my passion and pain 
Has brought me my first love back again, 
When the wild sea chickens began to flock. 

When the winds blow into the harbor mouth; 

The wave breaks over the Lighthouse rock; 
As the rain turns white on the windy South, 
Like a ghost of the Earth or a wraith of the air, 
Is the cry of a lady, with snow-white hair. 

The wild sea chickens begin to flock. 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE HEART 

When Day is dying in the West, 

Through shadows, faint and far. 
It holds, upon its gentle breast, 

A tender, nurseling star; 
As if to symbolize above, 
How shines a pure young mother's love. 

I watch the sun depart; 
A whisper seems to say. 

So comes the twilight of the heart, 
More beautiful than day. 

The listless summer sleeps in green. 

Among my orange flowers ; 
The lazy south wind steals between 

The lips of languid hours; 
As if Endymion, lapped in fern. 
Lay dreaming of the Moon's return. 

The long years seem to part 
Like shadows cold and gray. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 167 

To show the twihght of the heart 
More beautiful than day. 

Old hopes and wishes seem to breathe 

The gentle evening air, 
Of Love and Sorrow, laid beneath 

A faded fold of hair: 
Life had no other love to give, 
Love had another life to live, 

In valleys far apart. 
In which the poets say 

There is a twilight of the heart 
More beautiful than day. 

I seem to see the smiling eyes 

That loved me long ago. 
Look down the pale and tranquil skies, 

In all the afterglow; 
The still delight; the smiles and tears 
Come back, through all the silent years, 

In which we are apart 
As if they came to say. 

Now is the twilight of the heart 
More beautiful than day. 



THE REAPERS 

When the tired reapers, with fragrant sheaves. 
Come out of the corn as the sun goes down, 

And the sky is rich as the falling leaves. 
In crimson and purple and golden brown, 

I sit in the mellow and marvelous eves. 

And watch as the loom of the sunset weaves, 
Its cloth of gold over country and town. 



168 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

And I think how the summers have come and gone, 
Since we saw the shuttle, across the blue, 

That wove the colors of dusk and dawn, 
Where the musk of the sleeping roses flew, 

On the wings of the southwind, over the lawn. 

And the waning shadows were longer drawn. 
And the sun was low, and the stars were few. 

When Love was sweet in the lives we led, 
As the leaven that lives in the latter spring; 

To grow in the flowers, the books we read, 
The romp and rush of the grapevine swing; 

In words and work, to be filled and fed. 

On brooks of honey and wastel bread 

And sung in the songs that we used to sing. 

And out of the shadows they come to me. 
As flowers of the spring come, year by year; 

The lovers we had, when to love was free; 
The stars were few and the skies were clear. 

And we knew it was happiness just to be 

In a world so gracious and fair to see. 

While the weary reapers were drawing near. 

Though the red and white roses have lost their 
leaves. 

In the ashes of summers of long ago. 
They come in the mellow and marvelous eves. 

With the harvest of love that we used to sow. 
As rich as the garlands the sunset weaves. 
When the tired reapers, with fragrant sheaves. 

Come out of the corn and the sun is low. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 169 
THE OLD CANOE 

Only an old canoe 

Hewed out of a cypress log, 

Half sunk in a saw-grass bog, 

And suncracked through and through. 

In the live-oak crotch on the bluff, 

A lookout scans the horizon 

Of sallow saw-grass; but deep enough, 

In the channel, to swim a bison. 

A bow shot south of the slough, 

There is many a wattled hut and thatch ; 

Cornfield, melon, potato patch, 

Rots with the old canoe ; 

Dead as the bones that lie 

In the shell marl, under our feet. 

By the thousands, withering white and dry, 

In their chalky winding-sheet ; 

The graves of a nation lived all through 

That left no sign but the old canoe. 

Over fifty years ago, 

The women came wailing, two by two. 

To see the tall warriors, all arow. 

Follow their chief to the war canoe. 

That lay by yon little sedgy shelf. 

And watch the rowers row; 

The paddle swing, like the heron's wing. 

The young chief going to give himself, 

A hostage, for Philip the King, 

And his squaw must watch at the live oak crotch, 

For a word that a bird of the air will bring. 



170 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

Coo-a-coo-chee has broken his parole; 

Slipped from a casemate and out of a porthole, 

His fetters left for the next deserter. 

But, after he passed, 

Was a shuddering shriek like the cry of murder, 

And the hoofs of riders riding fast. 

And when he came in the war canoe, 

The robe of scarlet, purple, and blue, 

Of the King in Hamlet, was dabbled red 

By a new wig torn from an actor's head. 

As they sat at feast of the ripened corn 
The wise old Philip spoke of ease 
And of peace, beyond the narrow seas, 
But Coo-a-coo-chee was full of scorn. 
Of the White's man's cunning to deceive, 
And the squaw wife waiting at his side. 
Looked down and said, *' How can we leave 
The grave of the little one that died ? " 

But Coo-a-coo-chee had broken his parole ! 
Recaptured under a flag of truce. 
The fetters clink for the long gun barrel ; 
Shot pouch, moccasin, deerskin trews. 
He lies in irons in Tampa Bay, 
His captors warning him every day 
To send for his people. Thereto he said, 
" If my people listen to hear my word 
The rattle of my chains is heard; 
And they will not heed, they are afraid. 
Then said the White Chief,* " Choose you, men; 
In forty days, if they come again, 
And bring your warriors, war shall cease; 
You and your people shall go in peace. 
If not, at the end of the fortieth day 
You hang at the yard-arm in Tampa Bay. 
♦General Jesup, U. S. A, 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 171 

Once more and no more, the old canoe, 
By winding waterways, goes and comes. 
It bears a people away from their homes, 
Like Charon's ferry that bore the shades. 
Out of the old life into the new. 
And was left adrift in the everglades. 

But fifty years ago! 

And the shell marl under our feet. 

Still keeps the dead in its winding sheet. 

In the places they used to know. 

The saw grass, bright as a basket of gold 

Still holds the picture it used to hold ; 

The slough, bayou, and the river. 

And the wreck of the old canoe. 

But the forms of life and love it knew 

Shall it know no more forever; 

And the low, white vapor curled 

Over empty village and open graves. 

And the cry of the silly, whimpering waves 

Is like the end of the world. 



SEPTEMBER 

The changeful skies; earth's varied stores, 
Have each a quiet way of speech, 

In soft, deceptive metaphors. 

That sweet as loving kisses teach. 

And when the tranquil tropic air 
A burst of fragrance overwhelms. 

I think how northern trees grow bare. 
Save where the ivy clots the elms. 



172 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

Like soft gray glass, the atmosphere 

Lies over mellow tilth and fallow; 
The little brook is dusky clear 

Across its agate-colored shallow. 

Through woodlands, where the shadow weaves 

A gleam of purple on the ground, 
The children gather painted leaves. 

And hear a sweet, inconstant sound, 

As if the hollow wood was breathing, 

Or see the highway's line of dust, 
A silvery mirage softly wreathing. 

By orchards sweet with apple must. 

The evenings linger, long and cool. 

Like brooks that loiter as they go. 
Where laggard waters love to pool, 

And listen to the underflow. 

And saffron shadows, still and bright. 
Like pictures seen through colored glass, 

Have touched with pale, unreal light, 
The undertones among the grass. 

With summer's wan and dying look, 

Ere frost, in her familiar woods. 
Has locked the windows of the brook 

In gray and glassy solitudes. 

Like some fair soul that doth forbode 

The gentle parting of the seals. 
Yet lingers smiling on the road, 

To speak the cheerful hope she feels. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 173 

Even as the last light ebbs away 

I linger by the pine and palm, 
To see the night rise cool and gray 

And nunlike, through the depths of calm. 

Nor pause to ask how many times 
The roses leaved to make so sweet 

September, here among the limes. 

Or there where fall and summer meet. 



AN OLD GEORGIA MANOR HOUSE 

In the awful hush of the midnight. 

The doors slam; and to and fro, 
From chamber to chamber and up the wide stair. 

The noiseless dead people go. 
Who lived in the house and were laid in their 
coffins 

On the oak trestles below. 

The gray-haired veteran of Eutaw 

Who shouldered his musket and marched; 

He lay on the trestles in buckle and band. 
And his white frill ruffled and starched. 

His poor pinched features sharp in the dark. 
And his blue lips shrivelled and parched. 

And the swart young soldier done to his death, 

In the night, by his own hand; 
The blood trickle staining the linen cloth. 

And the wretched bloody brand. 
And splotching the floor, till they clouted it up 

In the soaking, clotted sand. 



174 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

Poor little babes ! Such small weak things, 
Whose death cuts deep and sharp. 

Had they but lived to be gray old men, 
And elders, down in the dorp, 

Could have told of the pilgrims who founded the 
home. 
In the day of Oglethorpe. 

But the black shut chambers are hushed 

All night, till the swathed moon. 
Looks in the South windows, to see all clear. 

And drive off the gray raccoon, 
That thieves, in the shade of the old log walls, 

By broad-bladed axes hewn. 

Then the rocking-chair rocks and the doors slam, 

The clock ticks loud and low; 
It seems to talk to the ghosts downstairs; 

Its gossip is heavy and slow. 
Of what has been done since they went to bed. 

In the graveyard down below. 

The house dog hears them and howls 

From his kennel under the sill; 
Like the shuffle of feet that carry a corpse. 

Blow the dry leaves harsh and shrill, 
And a death cloud wraps up the moon, 

Like a dead face stark and still. 

But the gaunt pines, hoarse and low. 

Like conventicles sour and grim. 
With cloaks of gray moss over their heads. 

Like soldiers of Hampden and Pym, 
Thunder low basses the whole night long. 

Of an old Moravian hymn. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 175 
OVER THE SUGAR KETTLES* 

De Lo'd, He in de cane row, gittin' out decane. 
(Solo.) 
Oh! Sinner! Oh! beware {chorus of all hands) . 
De debbil in de cane stock, all his might and main . 
(Solo.) 
Oh, Sister! Don't you care! 

De Lo'd, He got de cane knife cuttin' of de hill, 
Oh! Sinner! Oh, beware! (Chorus of female 
voices.) 
T'row 'em on de hoss ca't; tote 'em to de milll 
Oh! Sister! Don't you care. (Chorus of male 
voices.) 

Put 'em in de cane mill ; mash 'em mighty fine. 

Oh! Sinner! Oh, beware! 
Massa! How de juice run, Jesus make de wine. 

Oh ! Sister ! Don't you care. 

Mash 'em into burgass; t'row 'em in de flame, 

Oh! Sinner! Oh, beware! 
Jesus wid de drip spoon, scum away de shame. 

Oh! Sister! Don't you care. 

Bimeby, de bead come! Sugar in de gourd, 
Oh! Sinner! Oh, beware! , 

Make de milk an' honey fo' de chillen of de Lo'd 
Oh! Sister, don't you care. 

♦Colored hands made a frolic of sugar making at night, 
singing old hymns like 

" Where Oh! Where is good old Daniel ? 
Safe over in the Promised Land." 



176 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 
THE ANGEL OF THE TWILIGHT 

When the long evenings slanting grow. 
In crystal rafters over the beach, 
The roofs of Heaven are almost in reach, 

As I think of my sorrow of long ago. 

Once more an old grief comes and wrestles. 
As Jacob wrestled at Jabbok's ford; 
A dumb resistance, with never a word, 

But the shadow burthening down the trestles. 

And a long foreboding that seems to grieve, 
Like the soldier who over his pallet hears. 
The whisper of patient suffering years. 

Before he is used to the empty sleeve. 

As I kissed and cried over a cold, still face. 
In her bridal robes, on her bridal bed. 
And ever repeated. She is not dead; 

She will come out of her nestling place. 

With flashes of laughter and wreathing arms. 
The maiden blush on cheeks of the wife; 
She will come back to me, life in life. 

In the dower of womanhood's bridal charms. 

Or a coming step, I whisper is hers. 

She sings the songs that she used to sing; 

She comes like the blossom exhaling spring 
Through the violet beds and the clover furze. 

And the sweet, still dream shall her vigil keep, 
The whole night long, as she nestles near, 
Her warm breath fanning my cheek and ear. 

As she lies in my loose light arms asleep. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 177 

If I seek her by day, with the voice or hand, 
It ends in a doleful even song, 
Or the tale of an ancient forgotten wrong. 

To children who do not understand. 

But after the twilight sheds its bloom. 
Far over the meadows about our home. 
The unseen angel may go and come 

And roll the stone from the mouth of the tomb. 

She comes in the dews of a paradise, 

A holy blessing about me steals; 

I feel her presence as one that feels 
The glow of light upon closed eyes. 

So when the evenings slanting grow. 
In crystal rafters over the beach. 
The roofs of Heaven are almost in reach. 

As I think of my sorrow of long ago. 



THE LONG DREAM 

The summer will come with a fresh perfume. 

Where all the brown leaves are lying. 
And the windy air, through the blush and bloom j 
As a shuttle flies through a silken loom. 
In the delicate foliage plying. 

The morning will gather its beauty anew. 

As sweet as in ghlhood's promise; 
Of green and golden, and rose and blue. 
To weave fresh violets out of the dew. 

As bright as the ones stolen from us 



178 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

As I lie at ease, in my long repose, 

All the beauty about me woven. 
Like the cunning of sense, as it inward flows, 
I shall feel in the blush that brightens the rose, 

And the germ when its husk is cloven. 

And the rootlets find their way underground 

Through the toils of a season's malice; 
Till I know how the coil of sense is wound 
To the far-off stars, in the depths profound, 
Where Earth seems a golden palace. 

But you will not know of the watch I keep. 

Where the flow of the senses all pass. 
Like a dreamer, who hears the stir and creep 
Of the wind, as he lightly lies asleep 
Under the broad-leafed catalpas. 



U. S. M. PASSENGER STEAMER 

Mississippi River, A.D., 1855-'61 

Where the black bayou pools 

In flags and cypress stools, 

It drops a dusky halo 

In the opalescent shallow 

That crowns, with somber dimness, 

A steamer's hulk and chimneys; 

As if the crevasse had caught her, 

Docked in her coflSn, and hurried her. 

In the arms of the pitiful water, 

Into her grave and buried her, 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 179 

The pastel painting mould, 

In colors of slime and ooze, 

Has laid their delicate hues 

In panels of greenish gold; 

And the vines, in the grand saloon. 

Have woven a silk cocoon. 

Like beds of the butterfly moth; 

But the gray moss, has, over all, 

Drawn a funereal pall 

Of satiny, velvet cloth. 

How changed, since the flying swallow tail 

At her flagstaff was symbolical 

Of the Pride of the river, chiding 

The fat salt marsh of the bayou. 

When the lords of the South came ariding 

From the Gulf to the Falls of Ohio, 

On business lively as pleasure ; 

And the wealth of the gilded cabin 

Was rich with a richer treasure 

Than the Roman stole from the Sabine. 

What has become of her master ? 
What has become of her men ? 
The damask and lambrequen 
Ormalu and alabaster.^ 
Her nostrils breathing benzen 
When throes of her mighty engine 
Made the chandeliers clink and shiver, 
To the throttle's hollow diphthong. 
And the coils of the sinuous river 
Unwound like a flying whipthong. 
As she blew a smoky streamer. 
That pictured, photographic. 
The bends of the river traflSc, 
In the nose of a rival steamer. 



180 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

What if some night-worn pilot, 

By New Cut, or low sand islet. 

Hears the capstan song of her dead men; 

The pant of her pistons churning. 

The pat of her buckets turning, 

And the long, slow cry of her lead men. 

While he sees her headlight burning 

In the bends of the old dead river. 

As of old the bold Sir Bedivere 

Saw the White Barge of the King come ; 

And he swears a prayer or two. 

Not for the national income. 

Less than the Evangelists 

Would care or dare e'er to. 

Look at her strange passenger lists 

Or the marvelously splendid 

Cargos, she used to deliver. 

On the banks of the old dead river. 

The day of her glory ended 

Captain and capstan song. 

And the phantom she chased so long. 

Ended her noble winnings, 
That once set the river atalking. 
The junk shop has scored her innings. 
And the fungus is doing her caulking. 
But the tall magnolias above her 
Hang, like a mourning lover, 
Dropping white immortelles 
In the long, unbroken swells. 
That picture, in polished emery, 
Cut water to cabin spar. 
Clear as a widowed memory, 
The days before the war. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 181 
ALWAYS 

Let the plover pipe to his mate in the weeds; 

The hart and the hind go play, 
But the fowler lurks in the marshy reeds, 

And the huntsman hides in the bay.* 

The salmon may leap in a fringe of froth. 
And the trout in the lake may laugh; 

But the fisherman's net will have them both. 
And cruel the barbed gaff. 

The eagle may lift, like a rising shout, 

To the very deeps of the sky. 
But the whistling bullet will find him out, 

Though he be ever so high. 

If ever the blue sky wears a sun 

That is glad in the light of day. 
Then the sorrowing stars come, one by one, 

And gather his glory away. 

Or, if ever the heart is rich and strong. 

As a bridegroom's first caress. 
The Death grief comes with its cruel wrong, 

And robs us of happiness. 

Let the plover pipe to his mate in the weeds. 

The hart and the hind go play. 
But the fowler lurks in the marshy reeds. 

And the huntsman hides in the bay. 

*Bay is bayou, a Florida word for a cypress swamp. 



182 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 
BLINDFOLDED 

Two little white hands close over my eyes, 
Tresses of brown hair touching my cheek; 

A mad, merry voice in my ear, laughing, cries, 
Who is it holds you now ? Answer me quick ! 

Do I not know them ? The bonny red lips ? 

Trim little waist in the calico gown? 
Eyes and long lashes, where tremblingly slips 

The lovelight so bashfully, tenderly down. 

Do I not know them ? Ay, Love, I was blind 
Ere the pretty ringed fingers came over my eyes 

With a way of their own that has taught me to find 
Every time that they touch me a sweeter sur- 
prise. 

CASTA DIVA 

Cold, in womanhood's chaste deceit; 

Passionless, pure, and singing alone. 
Ere the wild white summer has reddened the wheat, 

And the musk of the locust bloom is blown, 
A slim cold sybil, singing of Death, 

And Love and Honor and Duty; 
Chiding the air with her fragrant breath. 

And making a sin of her beauty. 

Though her lips be sweeter than flowers of wine, 

When it beads in the crimson sheath of glass, 
If she loves me not, what pleasure is mine ? 

It is but a violet hid in the grass. 
To the wanton bee in his gold lace coat. 

Whose violin wings are tuning. 
In many a cooing and amorous note, 

The bee to the blossom crooning. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 183 

For she comes like the Morning's misty cloud 

That leaves its print on the garden bed ; 
On the Burgundy roses, grown more proud, 

And the pink carnations, a deeper red ; 
She goes, as sweet to the finger tip, 

In her beauty, stately and chilly; 
But for the geranium red of her lips, 

As the white of a cold, still lily. 

Oh! sweet cold victims, withering sweet, 

The pale, pure flowers her fingers hold. 
Plucked ere the honey was made complete, 

In orchids, roses, and marigold. 
Till she seems a sin, as her fingers mix. 

The cold of her beauty rebuking. 
The passion flowers and kiss-me-quicks, 

That her eyes are overlooking. 

Oh! sin of being so sweet a thing; 

So passionless pure in her cold content, 
A chill denial of sweetheart spring 

And out of her beauty, insolent; . 
A slim cold sibyl singing of Death 

And Love and Honor and Duty, 
Chiding the air with her fragrant breath 

And making a sin of her beauty. 



FLORIDA DAWN 

The moon is low in the sky. 

And a sweet south wind is blowing. 
Where the bergamot blossoms breathe and die; 

- In the orchard's scented snowing; 
But the stars are few, and scattered lie, 
Where the sinking rooon is going, 



184 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

With a love sweet ache, a strain 
Of the night's deHcious fluting 

Stirs in the air, with as sweet a pain 
As the flower feels in fruiting; 
• And the night air blows a breath of rain. 
Over buds and tendrils shooting. 

Sweet as the wedding oath. 

Of the light and shadow sworn. 

As the mist, like a great white cloth. 

Draws out of the orchard and corn. 

Out of her chamber, blush and loth. 

Like a bride comes the dewy Morn. 



THE SPIRIT OF MELODY 

The glitter and flush of beautiful hands 

Over murmuring ivory keys ; 
And a voice like ripples o'er rushes and sands, 

Caught up by the freshening breeze. 
That gathers and sparkles and flows from her lips. 

Like the bubbles of pink champagne. 
Till a thrill of elysium, the senses eclipse. 
And the soul floats down, like unpiloted ships. 

On the waves of the sweet refrain. 

And the flash of the hands; the flow of the voice; 

And the charm of the beautiful eyes. 
Though fair as the songs in which angels rejoice, 

In the purples of Paradise, 
Have an echo of something the spirit once heard 

Falling low on the listening ear. 
When the first triumph of melody stirred, 
Before ever music had wedded the word, 

In the songs of a different sphere. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 185 

BABY AND MUSTARD PLAYING BALL 

Noon in the tropics, blue and bright, 
Under the palm tree, stands upright. 
The dew of the rainbow burns in the glare. 
That leaves a dazzle and flash in the air; 
And the breath of the fragrant mouth of June 
Is sweet in the spices of afternoon. 
Under the shaddock and lemon trees, 
Grandpa dozes away at ease; 
The partridge pea, in its crimson hood. 
Is scattered about, like drops of blood 
It slips in his slumber, and interweaves 
A dream of the arrows parting the leaves; 
And the gallant fellows who fell with Dade 
In the reddened grass of the Everglade; 
And the Colonel-Governor going to dine. 
With his own blood red in the cups of wine. 

The Ponceana, in panicles. 

With a bu-d of Paradise plume and bells, 

Is steeped in sun, and the petals hold 

A tiny edging of scalloped gold. 

Where the Cape Jesamines' scented snow. 

Breathe a fragrance across the glow; 

And the spice of the oleander flies 

Under the lids of his sleepy eyes, 

And the cypress vine has blown a score 

Of scarlet bloom on the puncheon flow; 

Over the porch and the rustic hall, 

Where Baby and Mustard are playing ball; 

Baby, a round little one-summer man. 

And Mustard, a pickle of black and tan. 



186 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

A bright little rustic scene it is, 
Of tropical beauty and homely bliss. 
The sun-burnt Baby, as brown as a nut, 
Tosses the ball in the broad log hut ; 
And Mustard catches it, hand over hand. 
And rolls outside with a bump on the sand, 
While Grandpa dozes, and inly grieves. 
In his dream, of the arrows parting the leaves, 
While Baby backing on limber wrist. 
Keeps holding the bone-rattle fast in his fist ; 
And over the stoop with a stumble and fall. 
For Baby and Mustard are playing ball. 

Chubby and Saucy, my brave little man. 
Collar and towsle the Black and Tan, 
For he can bound and bounce like the ball, 
While you, my little one, have to crawl. 
Where the flowers and foliage fence you in 
The porch, with the yellow jasmine. 
But outside meadows show daflfydowndillies, 
And all the lake margin is white with lilies, 
Where the shadows of flying paroquets. 
Green and gold, in the quivering heats. 
Seem to plunge in the water, and skim. 
By a cool delightful under swim, 
Far under the nosing alligator. 
Whose bubbling spine along the water 
Startles the shadowy white Ergette 
Out of the border of emerald wet. 
While Grandpa dozes, and dreams again 
That the old wound opens a fresh red stain ; 
And knows not Baby has, on all fours. 
Crept and tumbled quite out of doors. 
Nor heeds the mockingbird's mimic call 
Of Baby and Mustard playing ball. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 187 

Spirea japonica, princess feather, 
Dahlias and asters crammed together; 
Lilac, laburnum, virgin's grace, 
The passion flower in blue and lace. 
Catch-fly, cockscomb, crimson ruffed; 
Portulacca and candytuft; 
Orchids, pinks, and anemones, 
Myriad of phlox and argemonies. 
Marigold, heartsease, violet. 
Verbenas, pansies, and mignonette. 
Sensitive plants and the rose of Sharon, 
Adam's needle, and rod of Aaron, 
Growing together, the wild and tame, 
And more that the florist cannot name, 
For every spear-grass shows a comb. 
And weeds in flower are quite at home, 
A jolly playground this for the man. 
Playing at baU with the Black and Tan, 
And Mamma away at her spinning wheel. 
When Grandpa, shuddering, seems to feel, 
The Indian's arrowhead scrape the bone, 
And wakes with a sobbing sigh or groan. 
Half conscious of all he sees or hears 
Through the whispers of dropping conifers; 
Wakes with a sudden glance and call 
To Baby and Mustard playing ball. 

For Baby, with crablike lurch and crawl. 
And frisky Mustard have lost the ball. 
Where out of the portulacca bed. 
There shoots a cone-shaped scaly head. 
The red blood curdles; the hard bones quake 
At the skirr of the deadly rattlesnake. 
Not a foot from the baby's chubby fist 



188 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

His clinched corals and limber wrist 
Too late for help! No bullet could fly, 
Before the little one has to die! 
Oh! God of Mercy, how dread a screen 
To draw before that beautiful scene. 
All life and loveliness. At a breath 
The shuddering horror of sudden death. 

A little white dove whose tender plumes 
First beat the air into feathery flumes 
Plucked by a cruel hand, and the spit 
Sent quivering, bleeding, quite through it; 
A little white bud that is pulled apart 
To the pink of its innocent, little heart, 
That might have given us joy, we know, 
Had it been left alone to blow; 
All cruel things that we do each day. 
Sum and complete themselves, by the way. 
The coiled snake with its cusped fang 
Out of the portulacca sprang. 

Careless, unconscious, brave little one; 
Tawny and ripe in the Florida sun; 
Chubby and naked, with nutlike fist, 
He strikes with a baby's random wrist. 
And the coiled snake back in collisive battle 
Strikes his poison fang — in the baby's rattle. 

Te Deum Laudamus; a baser cause 
Has roused and centered people's applause. 
When a shouting army, in rank on rank. 
Has crowded the churches just to thank 
Their God, with a vocal and brazon din, 
That He has permitted us all to sin. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 189 

But stop, and stifle your glad surprise. 
A Florida rattlesnake never flies ; 
The beauty of swiftly recovered coil, 
Sudden and smooth as the glide of oil 
And the shuddering beat of that deadly hum 
Is the rattlesnake's sallying tenor drum. 

Courage, little one, chubby and tough! 
But surely now, you have done enough; 
Not with your baby and naked hands 
To grapple the speckled thing in the sands. 
While Grandpa's shout and Mamma's scream 
Burst like life in a startled dream. 
Too late! But Mustard has heard the call 
And goes for the snake, instead of the ball. 

Tug and twist; and a sudden jerk. 
Bravo! Mustard has done the work; 
Limp, with life beginning to fail, 
Down to the tip of its rattle tail. 
While Grandpa powders away at its head. 
And slaughters — the portulacca bed. 

And this, I gather, will do for all. 
Of Baby and Mustard playing ball, 
In the fragrant Florida afternoon. 
And the juicy beauty of spicy June. 
And like the snake, to end with a tail. 
One dog in the world there is : Not for Sale. 

Jesus who loveth and chasteneth; 
Some to Mercy and some to Death; 
Blessed are they who receive His grace 
And in their little ones see His face. 



190 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 
THE MOORINGS 

Moored out in the bay! 
And slowly under her keel, 
The long wave seems to feel ; 
To crawl and feel its way, 
As if her stem might rip 
The smooth photogeny, 
Of the picture of the ship 
In the hollow of the sea. 

Only twice a day 

The short tide comes and goes. 

Crunching under her toes. 

Muttering and coughing; 

And, lazily enough, 

About her, in the offing, 

The sun and shadows luff. 

About the great white ships; 
The burly tugs and ferries; 
The fishing smacks and wherries, 
And the little sandy slips. 
She sees their shadows clear. 
By one, by two, by three, 
Appear and disappear 
In the hollow of the sea. 

What has become of her master, 
What has become of her men ? 
Shall the bo's'n never again 
Beat up to quarters, or cast her 
Dipsy lead in the shallow. 
To a sort of nasal tune. 
Larded with talk and tallow 
In the bight of the afternoon ? 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 191 

Shall one never see 
Her as she used to be, 
One solid sheet of bloom, 
From her foretop studding sail 
Down to her channel rail ; 
Aft to her spanker boom. 
Fore to her flying jibs, 
Flower out her ribs. 
White as a lily buds, 
Out of the salt sea suds ? 

Shall she never salt her 
Timbers in old traflfic, 
Down the coast of Afric, 
Sailing from Gibraltar 
Round by Mozambique? 
Shall she never speak 
Sampan rafts afloat; 
The lean-toothed sloop of war ? 
Or home bound, the Pilot Boat, 
At the break of the harbor bar ? 

Or when the scuds of clouds 

Blacken the night with rain. 

Feel her timbers strain 

From truck to futtock shrouds 

To run the sharp blockade. 

With the Federal gunboats at her 

Bursting a cannonade, 

In the hiss of the driving water! 

Never! Her day is over. 
Of war and tempest and gain. 
No more shall the lusty strain 
Start in the old sea rover; 



192 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

The crack of the canvas snapping, 
The shouts of the men; the souse 
Of the salt brine barking and flapping 
And poppling under her bows. 

Never! Her rotting brails 
Sag down from the yard ; 
The mildew is on her sails ; 
The shellfish crusts a shard 
Over her copper legging, 
As, limed in the ooze she waits, 
Like Belisarius begging 
At the conquered city's gates. 



THE NORTHERN SNOW 

An exile to the pine and palm, 

I see the far-winged summer brood, 

In azure depths of endless calm 
Above a spice-breathed solitude. 

And ample breadths of bloom unfurled. 
As sweet as that voluptuous South, 

When Antony gave the Roman world 
For Egypt's Cleopatra mouth. 

All things of sound and sense appear 
To breathe of nothing but content, 

As if, unheeded through the year, 

The vagrant seasons came and went. 

Yet often, when I hear the rain. 
In fleecy vapors whisper low. 

Like ghosts before my window pane. 
My heart would leap to see the snow. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 193 

To see across the frozen meres 

In chalk and crayon's black and white, 

The river hills through atmospheres, 
Wind-blown, in dazzle points of light. 

The smothered roofs that lie below 
The little wreaths of thin blue smoke, 

Where dodder holds handfuls of snow 
Above them on its mother oak. 

In smooth white level lies the croft, 
A mound of snow, the boxwood shines 

Still sweep the trowels, white and soft. 
In sloping curves and sweeping lines. 

Soft flurries, as a shadow blurs 
The page in passing, light and fleet, 

Of soft warm faces wrapped in furs. 
Of faces passing on the street. 

I see them through the falling rain. 

Through all the years that lie between 
Like ghosts before the window pane 

Among the musk and evergreen. 

Old boyhood friends ; the fair young wife 
Who watched with me, so long ago, 

As if across another life 

Among the softly falling snow. 

While yearning under pine and palm 

The winds do chide uncounted hours. 
Whose unspent summers dull the calm 
. In soft still utterances of Flowers. 



194 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 
TROUT FISHING 

'Tis twenty years! Do you remember. 
When, boy and girl, we stole the skiff, 
And went afishing one September? 
The lake so clear, it was as if 
Upborne on Love's delicious leaven. 
We floated in a pure midheaven, 
With clouds of lilies for a border. 
The fragrant summer seemed to ache, 
In blossom, for dear passion's sake. 
Excessive with its sweet disorder. 
In you, too, was the fond distress, 
Of flush and fear and happiness. 
Caresses by caress unhanded, 
Till fingers mated on the rail, 
I thought the very trout could feel 
The double spoil was caught and landed. 

Alas! that Love, which we remember. 
Blush-ripe, as all those wanton weeds. 
Should be a blossom of September, 
Born guiltless of the promise seeds; 
A dying thing, whose only duty 
Was clothing Life in forms of beauty. 
For though I held you in my arms. 
As full of honey, in your charms. 
As when the trefoil holds the clover. 
Your fingers, tutored in a thimble, 
In playing trout, were found so nimble, 
You caught the fish, and cast the lover. 

Yet often, since we slipped the books. 
To play for life with baited hooks, 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 195 

In pools less pure, do I remember 
That fragile blossom of September, 
Born guiltless of the promise seeds — 
A dying thing whose only duty 
Was clothing life in forms of beauty, 
As a pretty novice in her beads, 
With heaven above and heaven below it; 
Our lives have grown to other needs; 
Our boat lies rotting in the weeds 
And we can neither raise nor row it. 



THE OLD MILL 

Live and Die; Live and Die! 

And all the weary, weary years go by; 

And the quaint old mill stands still; 
The sun-mixed shade, like a spotted snake. 
Lies haK hidden in the bosky brake. 

And half across the rill. 

The summer comes, and the winter comes; 
The flower blooms, and the striped bee hums, 

And the old mill stands in the sun; 
The lichen curls from the walls aloof. 
And the rusty nails, from the ragged roof 

Drop daily, one by one. 

The long grass grows in the shady pool. 
Where lazy cattle used to come to cool, 

And the rotting wheel stands still; 
The gray owl winks in the granary loft. 
And the sly rat slinks, with a pitpat soft. 

From the hopper of the quaint old mill. 



196 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

The mill wheel clicked and the mill wheel clacked, 
And the groaning grooves once creaked and 
cracked, 

And the children came and played; 
The lazy team, in the days of yore, 
Munched their fodder at the old mill door, 

And drowsed in the grateful shade. 

But the miller died, the good wife died, 
And the children all went far and wide; 

From the playground by the dam; 
Their marble ring is grass o'ergrown. 
As the mossy foot of the old gravestone. 

Where the old folks sleep so calm. 

Yet the miller's son, in the city thick, 
Dreams that he hears the old mill click, 

And sees the wheel go round ; 
And the miller's daughter, through her half-shut 

eyes, 
Can see her father, in his dusty guise. 

And the place where the corn was ground. 



IN MEMORY OF THE CONFEDERATE 
DEAD 

Read before Camp 54, Confederate Veterans , 
June 17, 1900, at Orlando, Orange Co., Fla. 

Sons of the old heroic South! 

Uplifted on her warriors' shields, 

In the dun smoke of the cannon's mouth 

Over a hundred battlefields 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 197 

Honor and Welcome! Here you are. 
Who, in courage and comradeship, 
Ere beard had grown on cheek and lip. 
Followed yon flag through four years* war. 
In battle and bivouac. 

Though no more, 
She calls her children, man by man, 
To tread war's dreadful threshing floor; 
No more those colors in the van; 
Rich as the mists of morning, drawn 
Across the sunbeam's triple bar. 
Forebodes the war clouds' stormy dawn; 
The batteries burst; the prickly jar 
Of musketry; the rolling fire. 
The battle yell, and slow retire 
And rally of the stubborn foe. 
Dissolving like the Northern snow, 
In frozen clots, that will not flow, 
As in the fire and sweat of blood 
Our flowers of victory burst the bud. 
And now as long as lives endure 
The memory of that glorious past, 
While comrades' names grow fewer and fewer 
Shall answer the roll call to the last. 

Born of Hope in a valley of tears. 
It marshaled the Southern cavaliers 
Over many a slippery field of blood, 
Under Lee and Longstreet, Jackson, Hood. 
It rode with Ashby, Stuart, Forrest, 
A rallying point when need was sorest; 
In Shiloh's battle where Johnston died. 
In the arms of victory, and astride 
Morgan and Mosby's plump of spears. 



198 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

Tumbling army trains by the ears. 

A welcome beacon that flashed and swam 

Over Hill's red shirt, at Antietam; 

Or punctured, riddled, split in half 

A symbol still on its broken staff, 

As when Joe Johnston's whip-poor-wills 

Were whistling in the Georgia hills, 

And the fierce light of war's rivalry 

Fell broad and bright on the Southern Cause 

To show that our Southern chivalry 

In the manner of moral training was 

All that a manly race should be. 

Whose type is the stainless name of Lee, 

For every thread of the banner wove 

By woman's hands and woman's love, 

Consecrated her soldier's cause 

Till all that is noble in Life, it was. 

The staff is broken; the bayonets rust; 
And Honor sleeps in heroic dust. 
That moulders on many a battlefield 
With the broken sword and shattered shield. 
The ramparts pressed by her soldiers' feet 
When the bay was crushed by a hostile fleet 
And our cities smitten with iron sleet. 
Have sunk in deserted weedy ponds. 
Green with the cannons' mouldering bronze. 
But the swelling spirit that reached the sky, 
Was the seed of God and cannot die. 
A cause may fail in the civil strife. 
But never the spirit that gave it life. 

Sometimes quarrying in the rocks 
That have survived the earthquake shocks. 
And nations sunk into nameless dust; 
We find, on the solid upturned crust. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 199 

The print of a fern leaf's filmy web 

As perfect in delicate spore and neb, 

Fibre and meshes, as when it grew 

A breath of the summer's sun and dew, 

Thousands of centuries ago, 

While mountains have melted away like snow. 

So wonderful are the ways of God, 

Who keepeth His record in the sod, 

Although a name be writ in the sand 

As the frame of a brave heroic deed, 

Like His seal in the rock of the fragile weed, 

'Tis the letter of His own hand. 

While grass grows and the waters run 
In the light that lives in the Southern sun, 
The very ground, like a written scroll. 
Scarped and terraced in ditch and knoll. 
Shall mark the places of battles won; 
And trench and pit, like a soldier's scar. 
Shall be memorials of the war. 
As close as a closely written page. 
In letters of war in its wasting fever 
Engraved in lead in the rock forever 
The tale of the South's Heroic Age. 

Queen of the South! our native land 
Crowned in summits of jeweled snow 
From the shouldering hills to the silver sand 
In the golden bowl of Mexico, 
She gathers and scatters with liberal hand 
An hour's wealth in each fruitful minute 
With a bounty that has " No winter in it.'* 
Wherever she presses her sandaled feet 
The flower blooms and the air is sweet. 
With pomegranate musk and orange bloom 



200 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

As vases of roses fill a room. 

Our nursing Mother though laws forbid 

The Cause we love, and the deeds we did 

Under her flag and in her name, 

All we fought for is just the same. 

In whatever color invasions come, 

The men who fight 
To the bitter end for the hearth and home, 

Are always right. 

At The Graves. 

With arms reversed and muffled drums 
The old victorious army comes 
From Manassas and Bentonville 
To those who are survivors still. 
The order of the day is read : 
" Camp 54 to bury the dead." 
The ghostly drum beat in our ears, 
The cavalry bugle ebbs and swells, 
Eyes dim with unforgetting tears. 
We scatter the holy asphodels. 



THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE DOE 

A Legend of Spanish Florida 

How sweet above the placid Ays, 

The rainbow mists dissolve and shiver, 

When first the morning's early rays, 
In shifting colors, clothe the river. 

The wild hydrangeas nod and dip; 

The water lilies choke the shallows ; 
The spider sails his painted ship 

In archipelagoes of mallows. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 201 

The spoonbill blushes to the quill. 
In mid leg musings in the water; 
The trout, in parlors cool and still, 
|\Lies hidden from the busy otter. 

The jasmine bugles blow a rhyme. 
Across the wind and water vagrance, 

As if distilled in bowls of thyme 

An ancient love song turned to fragrance. 

And all is fair as in the days 

When, slim and feathered, like her arrows, 
The White Doe saw, across the Ays, 

The Spaniard riding down the narrows. 

Old ways go out, as seasons fall, 
The rosary drives the zuni feather; 

But Love's the cord that runs through all, 
And holds the beads of prayer together. 

Pea-blossoms blew, and trumpet flower; 

The spring was sweeting for the farmer, 
When to her door, in evil hour. 

The Spaniard rode in shining armor. 

He wore the Pine and Paroquet 

Embroidered on his shield and pennon. 

The golden spurs were on his feet. 
His bugle baldric white as linen. 

He kissed the gourd she held to him. 

Their hands, their lips were pressed together 

He crossed the ford where lilies swim, 
And vanished like a floating feather. 



202 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

She heard his carol faintly float 

Away across the border sedges, 
And die, on many an amorous note, 

Along the rivers willowy hedges. 

A kiss ! How small ; how sweet a thing ! 

It thrilled her, like a field of clover. 
That feels the lips of light in Spring, 

And breaks in red and white all over. 

She saw him, as on placid Ays, 

The rainbow mists dissolve and shiver, 

When first the morning's early rays 
In shifting colors clothe the river. 

He could not be a mortal born; 

He came so strange; he shone so brightly; 
His wonder steed ; his bugle horn ; 

His bearded lip that kissed so lightly. 

Wherefore she built herself a shrine 
To Phoebus and the Zuni feather. 

And sang the Paroquet and Pine 

In cooing hymns to summer weather. 

Now in those days sought bigot Spain, 
From Cofachi to Carlos hatchee, 

By cross and fagot, to restrain 
The worship of the Apalache. 

The wild knight of the Paroquet, 

Would God, he met our good Sir Walter, 

Like levin bolt and scaur in wheat, 
O'erthrew in scorn her simple altar. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 203 

When kneeling at his feet she prayed ; 

God man, or God, or more than human! 
" Save me from shame, a simple maid, 

For you are strong, and I am woman." 

In vain she prayed. But now to June 
By Zodiac paths of stars ascended; 

The Sun, throned high in Afternoon, 

Looked down the radiant deeps, offended. 

As berries are of blossoms reaped 

By force, transforming and impassioned, 

To silver hoofs her hands were shaped, 
And in the Doe her form was fashioned. 

But as the caitiff knight drew off, 
Apalled by such metempsychoses ! 

The sunbeams smote his metal coif. 
And coiled him like the rod of Moses. 

" Blind to Love's voice, accursed Thing ! 

Your portion be to guard and follow, 
Until the shifting season's bring, 

A mate for her who loves Apollo. 

Three hundred times the orange bloom 
Has blown in bubble gold its juices; 

Three hundred times in song's perfume 
The jasmine bugles sounded truces. 

And still the White Doe wears the form 
And nature of her timid fashion; 

The rattlesnake still sounds alarm. 
And all who see her burn with passion. 



204 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

But when her lover shall appear, 
Once more will rise the Zuni feather. 

The corn grow fuller in the ear, 

And Red and White lie down together. 

The Ays: There has been confusion in identify- 
ing this river of the old chronicles. In the Ap- 
lachi, the meaning Ays or Aisa, is a deer, by which 
the region now known as Orange County was 
meant. The river was probably the Oklewaha, or 
the Kissiommee, later names given by the Seminole. 

The Zuni feather was a symbol of religious 
mystery. 

The esteem in which this noble adventurer 
was held by the Indians, no less than his cotem- 
poraries in Europe, is shown in Hackluyt, the 
compte rendu and Kingsley's essay. His name 
was the promised refuge from oppressions of 
Spain until it passed into a sort of myth or super- 
stition. 

To hunt the White Doe is to go on an unat 
tainable pursuit. 

MILKING TIME 

The Sun is low and the sky is red. 

Over meadows in rick and mow; 
And out of the lake-grass, overfed. 

The cattle are winding slow. 
A milky fragrance about them breathes, 

As they loiter, one by one. 
Over the fallow, and out of the sheathes. 

Of the lake-grass in the sun; 
And hark, in the distance, the cattle bells, 
How drowsily they steal; 
16, Redpepper, Brindle, Browny, and Barleymeal. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 205 

From standing in shadowy pools at noon, 

With the water udder deep. 
In the sleepy rivers of drowsy June, 

With the skies above asleep; 
Not a leaf astir on orange or oak, 

And the palm flower thirsting in halves, 
They wait for the signs of the falling smoke 

And the evening bleat of the calves 
And hark, in the distance, the cattle bells, how 

drowsily they peal ! 
16, Redpepper, Brindle, Browny, and Barleymeal. 

Oh! wife whose wish still lingers and grieves. 

In the chimes that go and come; 
For Peace and Rest in the twilight eves. 

When the cattle are coming home ; 
How little we knew, in the deepening shades, 

How far our ways would lie; 
My own alone in the everglades. 

And your home there in the sky; 
And how I would linger alone in the old fa- 
miliar peal, 
16, Redpepper, Brindle, Browny, and Barleymeal. 

THE BURIED HOPE 

Fold down its little baby hands; 

It is a hope you had of old. 
Fillet the brow with rosy bands. 

And kiss its locks of shining gold. 
Somewhere, within the reach of years. 

Another hope may come, like this. 
But this poor babe is gone in tears. 

With thin, white lips, cold to thy kiss. 



206 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

In summer, a little wreath of flowers ; 

In winter, a little drift of snow; 
And this is all, through all the hours. 

Of the promise perished long ago. 
So every heart holds one dear grave. 

Close hidden under its joy or care, 
Till over it winds of memory wave, 

And lay the little headstone bare. 



THE BERGAMOT BLOSSOM 

We had no other gifts to give. 
But just one withering flower; 

We had no other lives to live, 
But just that one half hour; 

So small, so sweet, its freight of musk 

Makes fragrant all life's after dusk. 

For this, the summer toiled and spun. 
With fairy fingers silken shot. 

Till moonlight's milky threads had run. 
In the scented, creamy bergamot. 

That gives one dear, remembered hour, 

The fragrance of the orange flower. 

Through love and parting this remains 
A memory, like a faint perfume. 

More dear than all life's loss and gains, 
About a withering orange bloom. 

Whose fading leaves of dusky green. 

Do say how sweet life might have been. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 207 
IDLE WORDS 

Oh! say not idle words are like 

A wind track on the sea, 
For oft a wandering chord may strike 

The heart's deep mystery; 
And tears, that prayers could not call up. 

Flow, as if strangely stirred. 
The fountain of the heart's full cup 

Ran over at a word. 

For idle words that fell unwatched. 

May rise in after years. 
With feeling song has never matched. 

And eloquence of tears. 
May breathe a thought whose lightest tone. 

From coldness or the grave. 
Brings one whose life or love alone 

We would have died to save. 

Then think not idle words are lost. 

For oh! they may return. 
With feeling time has guarded most 

Within her sacred urn; 
They fall, like Undine's, careless tears 

Among the Danube's whirls. 
To be regained in after years, 

A diadem of pearls. 



208 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 
IN MEMORIAM 
Paul Hamilton Hayne : Obiit. July 7, 1886 

No battle note or pomp of arms reversed; 

No tuck of drum shall be his last requiem. 
But in our hearts his memory is hearsed, 

And in our love we build his mausoleum. 

The pure in heart ! As little children hear 

In the still night the purling of some fountain 

Lulling their dreams, come like the messenger 
Whose feet are beautiful upon the mountain. 

So, to Life's troubled dream, his songs have given 
Preludes of higher themes, as if the proem 

Of songs the great archangel sings in heaven 
Lived in his verse, and made his life a poem. 

JIMMY'S WOOING 

The wind came blowing out of the West 

As Jimmy mowed the hay; 
The wind came blowing out of the west, 
It stirred the green leaves out of their rest, 
And rocked the bluebird up in his nest, 

As Jimmy mowed the hay. 

The swallows skimmed along the ground. 

As Jimmy mowed the hay; 
The swallows skimmed along the ground 
And rustling leaves made a pleasant sound. 
Like children babbling all around, 

While Jimmy mowed the hay. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 209 

Milly came with her bucket by — 

And Jimmy mowed the hay — 
Milly came with her bucket by, 
With wee light foot, so trim and sly, 
And sunburnt cheek and laughing eye, 

As Jimmy mowed the hay. 

A rustic Ruth in linsey gown — 

And Jimmy mowed the hay — 
A rustic Ruth in linsey gown ; 
He watched the soft cheeks changing brown. 
And the long dark lash that trembled down. 

Whenever he looked that way. 

And Milly's heart was good as gold. 

As Jimmy mowed the hay; 
Oh! Milly's heart was good as gold, 
But Jimmy thought her shy and cold ; 
And more he thought he never told. 

As Jimmy mowed the hay. 

The wind came gathering up his bands. 

As Jimmy mowed the hay. 
The wind came gathering up his bands. 
With the clouds and lightning in his hands. 
And a shadow covering all the lands 

As Jimmy mowed the hay. 

The rain came pattering down amain, 

Where Jimmy mowed the hay; 
The rain came pattering down amain. 
And under a thatch of the laden wain, 
Jimmy and Milly, a cunning twain. 

Sat sheltered by the hay. 



210 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

For Milly nestled to Jimmy's breast, 

Under the thatch of hay — 
For Milly nestled to Jimmy's breast, 
A wild bird fluttering home to nest. 
And then, I swear, she looked her best, 

Under a thatch of hay. 

For when the Sun came laughing out 

Over the ruined hay; 
And when the sun came laughing out 
Milly had ceased to pet and pout. 
And twittering birds began to shout 

As if for a wedding day. 



FALLEN LEAVES 

The dying summer had spilled its blood. 

Oh ! the beautiful weather ! 
On all the oak leaves in the wood, 

As we went out together. 

The partridge sprang from the yellowing corn. 

Oh! the beautiful weather; 
And sang the song of a bridal morn. 

As we went out together. 

The wind came gathering up her band. 

Oh! the fickle weather! 
Like mourners following, hand in hand. 

As we came home together. 

The red leaves tumbled among the rocks; 

The cruel, cruel weather, 
Like birds shot bleeding out of flocks. 

As we came home together. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 211 

The cold rain sobs on the fallen leaves 

And over the sodden heather; 
A lonesome heart that sighs and grieves 

Knows it is wintry weather. 



COASTING FROM BARBADOES 

Coasting from Barbadoes ; 

My love is a bed of roses; 

Coasting from Barbadoes, 

As the pomegranate evening closes, 

She comes, with her maids, to the leafy coves. 

Smooth in the shallows, and sweet as cloves. 

Where the shade all day reposes. 

Coasting from Barbadoes, 

She bares her feet in the sand, 

And the sweet girl laughter comes and goes 

Back from the sea and land. 

It comes to the ship in the violet dusk. 

Like slips of orange and landward musk. 

Of Indus and Sarmacand. 

Coasting from Barbadoes, 

Oh! ripple that left the ship. 

You will toy and play on the buds of rose 

And die on her fragrant lip ; 

But what has a reefer who sails the sea 

To do with such a beauty as she; 

A delicate Eden slip ! 

Coasting from Barbadoes 
A fin's flash in the dark! 



212 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

A waister cries, as it dips and shows, 
" Lower away for the shark! 
But a reefer plunges before he speaks. 
And rises among the girlish shrieks. 
Nimble and lithe and stark. 

Coasting from Barbadoes, 

The tall ships come and go, 

As I think of the time I plunged and rose 

In the round little cove below. 

Snatching a wife from the hungry bay, 

A blush of love in the dying day, 

Of the summers of long ago. 

THE PHANTOM TRAIN 

At the dead of the night, the dead of the night. 

There's a sound along the rails, 
The clank and creak of a whirling crank, 

Like the flapping of iron flails. 

With the long low roll that heralds a storm, 

Over sunburnt fields of grain ; 
With the sullen roar of rain in the wood 

Comes the invisible train. 

It stops nor stays by station or town. 

But sweeps, in its viewless flight. 
To a city whose beautiful walls are hewn 

From the splendid quarries of light. 

Unseen, from the silent land it comes. 
Where the mists lie, low and deep. 

In the beating pulses like muffled drums, 
^Ybile the passengers wake or sleep. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 213 

And dream till the morning white and cold 

Comes out of the shining east 
And breaks the Lazarus sleep of night, 

With a touch as of God's high priest. 



THE TRANSIT OF VENUS 

And as we walked, that summer night. 
She chided me, because I told her*; 

Oh! kiss me, love, beneath their light, 
Before the moon and stars are older. 

Was it to see the bridegroom moon 
Fill all the skies with loving splendor, 

She raised her eyes, that night of June, 
So darkly gray and brightly tender. 

For as the moonlight kissed those eyes, 
And drew its scarf about her shoulder, 

We tasted dews of Paradise, 

Before the moon and stars were older. 



THE PARTING SOUL 

Kctrat KaXos *A8<i)ns ctt' (opecri 

— Dirge of Adonis. 

Alas! poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio, 
A fellow of infinite jest; of most excellent fancy. 
He hath borne me on his back a thousand times. 
— Hamlet, Act V, scene i. 

Last night, by some unconscious sense, 

I felt the spirit leave the clay ; 

Before my sight, this body lay, 
In all its helpless impoteiicet 



214 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

Around me swam all sweet desires 
Of life fulfilled, and at an end, 
I saw the past and present blend 

In one, like flames of wedded fires. 

No more to do : All work was done. 

Henceforth my spirit clove through space. 
And stood with Wisdom, face to face. 

With all its final conquests won. 

No more removed, but purified, 

It joined the conscious chain of sense, 
That springs from All-Intelligence 

In the I am, uncrucified. 

A larger influence moved it on. 

Above the plain of Pride and Pelf, 
In that complete increase of Self, 

That gathers all, through all, in One. 

It had no need to speak or move; 
It had no wishes to fulfil. 
For all things lay within its will, 

And all of love, for it was Love. 

But there the helpless body lay. 

How pitiful! How cold and pale! 
The fetters and the broken jail. 

All windowless, and cold and gray. 

No more to ache or grieve or cry. 

No more to suffer or to think; 

No more to eat or sleep or drink; 
No more to wake; no more to die. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 215 

And yet how pitiful it was; 

The blue white lips and stiffened form, 
That once had been so sweet and warm, 

Within its little round of laws. 

I almost wished to die for it. 

For it had been so true to me; 

So free of gall or jealousy; 
So full of laugh and simple wit. 

And now! A poor weak thing like that, 

Believed unworthy of the light; 

And to be hidden out of sight; 
A trampled clod; a bruised mat. 

A lump of clay; a thing rejected. 

Or fit to feed the garden mould. 

And grow again, in green and gold. 
Of its sweet nature imperfected. 

Not to be thought of or compared. 
But look you, now: I can remember. 
Some twoscore years ago, the ember 

Of baby life became ensphered. 

And all the days of childhood hide 
In efflorescence, happier. 
With this, my little playmate here, 

Than I could tell you, if I tried. 

Those poor cold feet of straitened look 
Have climbed the apple trees for me. 
And I scarce higher than your knee. 

Or, barefoot, paddled in the brook. 



216 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

Those arms have clasped a mother's breast; 

That tongue about a father's knee 

Has prattled of the life to be, 
So sweet, although so poor at best. 

That cold and unresponsive brain 

Has, through the ever-quenched eyes, 
Its service borne, to make me wise, 

In cells and chambers full of pain. 

And just for what ? Not Self, but me ! 

Some idle honor lost or won. 

Enough to know its part was done, 
And I was happy, just to be. 

How wan the poor thing is. I would 
That I could close the cold, sad eyes 
That never more will see the skies, 

Or kiss the lips so shrunk and blued. 

I do not praise its form or grace, 

Or make it other than I see; 

Worn out in service, all for me; 
And dear because she loved its face. 

Pale Self, I kiss thee, so subdued, 
Lest of thy heart, some bitter herb 
Should grow up rankly, and disturb 

Man with infused ingratitude. 

Of all that's true, thou wert the truest; 

Of all that's kind, thou wast most kind; 

My perfect image was thy mind 
In what I am, and what thou knewest. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 217 

Now to be rich and strong and use 
The general gift of conscious sense, 
That runs through Nature, I go hence, 

Half traitor; then a voice said : Choose! 

All things flow out from God and back, 
In one full circle. Nothing grows 
But in the current Life that flows 

From Him; and yet there is no lack. 

And as my married lips in breath, 
Kissed the cold clay, the life insped, 
And like a whisper, something said : 

This spirit was not ripe for Death. 



THE GOLDEN WEDDING 

Come, sit thee down, my gentle love, 

So many Mays have come. 
And gone, since those old courtship days, 

Before we made our home, 
I hardly realize the doubts 

And fears that vexed me then. 
Is there no echo in your heart 

Of those old days again ? 

How long we were apart. It seemed, 

So strange to come together; 
The long sad miles that lay between, 

Of fair and stormy weather; 
The letters often read, and words, 

So precious to the heart. 
And now! It is as strange to think 

We ever were apart. 



218 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

I see some broken trinkets yet 

Given in those sweet old days, 
You cherish them as if they were 

Links of that time always. 
I saw you yesterday take up 

An old gift of those years, 
And kiss the faded face and frame, 

With strange and tender tears. 

And this poor picture of yourself, 

Worn on my heart so long; 
The memory of the day 'twas given 

Is sweet as some old song. 
Some sweet old song, that's incomplete. 

In notes and broken bars. 
As if a half had gone to heaven, 

To sing among the stars. 

The first kiss trembled on your lip. 

So maidenly and shy, 
You blushed and trembled so; as if 

Its sweetness made you die! 
For all your color fled again. 

So sweet it was, and fleet. 
Yet say the poets what they may. 

This last is just as sweet. 

For all that was, and all that is, 

And all that is to be. 
Are parts of that one whole, our lives — 

Made one to you and me; 
And if I loved you so of old, 

You'd scarce believe, before; 
Yet now believe me: Every day 

I've loved you more and more. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 219 

Pray God, it may be to the last. 

The two lives grown in one, 
Like some fair plant that every day 

Grows upward to the Sun; 
So nearer heaven may we grow. 

With tender ties unriven, 
Till ripe, the harvests gathered in 

And garnered up in Heaven. 



SOUTH FLORIDA NIGHT 

The rain floats off. The crescent moon 

Holds in its cup a round of dusk, 
Like palm buds, in the month of June 

Half breaking through a vernal husk. 
While breathes a low, sweet undertone 

Like brooks that grieve through beds of fern. 
As if, by curve and pebble stone. 

The moon had spilled her silver urn. 

Night blooming agaves part the sheaf. 

To catch the light, distilled in showers. 
Till, overflowing cup and leaf. 

Each cluster breaks in midnight flowers. 
Like merchants breaking kids of nard, 

And jars of olives, desert born, 
Pineapples lift a prickly shard. 

And show the seeds of fragrant corn. 

Like Hebrew maids, the citrons hold 
Their pitchers to the vapor spring. 

And fill the hollow rinds of gold, 
With midnight's musky offering; 



220 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

So once, I think, Earth knew her Lord, 
In lands, like these, of palm and vine, 

When midnight gave the sweet accord 
That turned the water into wine. 



THE GREEK BOW 

Iliad Book IF, v. 104-131 

After Athena had spoken, his mind was given over 

to folly. 
He stripped the sheathe from the bow, he had got 

from a wild, leaping Big Horn, 
Lying in wait, he had shot it himself, as it came 

down the rocks. 
Right through the chest and straightway it had 

fallen headlong down from the cliff; 
And the growth of the horns from the head was 

a spread, fully, of sixteen palms. 

The bowyer, horn-polishing artist had fitted them 

well together. 
Smoothly wrought to the finish and furnished with 

golden tips. 
Stooping down, as he bent the bow, he held it 

inclined to the ground. 
While his valiant comrades surrounding, held 

their shields upright before him 
Lest any other warlike sons of Mars, the Greeks, 

should spring up, 
Ere ever the martial Menelaus, son of Atreus was 

arrow shot. 
Uplifting the lid of the quiver, he selected an 

arrow out of it ; 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 221 

One that had never been shot, a winged venom- 
cursed, full of pain. 
He fitted the notch of the piercing arrow even, on 

the bowstring; 
And prayed to Apollo, the Lycian born god of the 

Archer, 
Offering an illustrious hecatomb, firstlings of 

lambs on his altar. 
As the ox hide sinews drew together the stiff tips, 

held by the middle, 
He brought the string to his breast, the iron head 

to his bow hand. 
As soon as the stiffening fibres wrenched the great 

bow round as a circle. 
Loosed from his thumb, the string snaps loud, 

and the leaping arrow, 
Whistling sharp at the mob, flies hissing with 

angry venom. 
Not then did the blessed immortal gods forget thee, 

oh ! Menelaus ! 
First and chiefest, the ruthless destroyer, daughter 

of love, standing 
Before thee, fended off lightly, the sharp pointed 

arrowflights' deadly minations; 
Brushing it back, lest it touch the skin, much as a 

nursing mother 
Brushes a fly from the child that lies in her lap 

in a pleasant slumber. 

THE LITTLE FAULT 

Dear eyes that wear the long regret 

For something missed, that should be ours, 

As if the part of life that set 

In me to music, like the flowers, 



222 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

In the expected hush, grew less 
And lost the accent of the psalm; 

Even while your wistful eyes express 
A faltering hope in what I am, 

That seemed so near; so bright and sure, 
Had I been something less, or more. 

In vain, I try to drive them back, 

These vague misgivings of the heart. 
In others' eyes we see the lack 

Is something wanting on our part 
And nothing, that the world can give. 

Can ease the heart's reproachful strife, 
At losing that for which we live ; 

The bloom and poetry of life. 
That seemed so near; so bright and sure, 

Had I been something less or more. 

You could not seem more beautiful. 

Nor I more worthy in your eyes. 
Yet doubts the heart will overrule. 

In which a vague disquiet lies; 
And questions come, unasked, unsought, 

As weapons, with unfitted helves. 
Is Life less Royal than we thought ? 

Or is its failure in ourselves ? 
It seemed so near, so bright and sure, 

Had I been something less, or more. 

A little flaw! We know not what 
That takes the beauty from the flowers, 

In all we see, that this is not. 

The perfect life that should be ours, 

Which through all change keeps still in sight 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 223 

As clear as shadows in the glass, 
Life's fair Ideal, framed in light. 

Through barriers that we cannot pass ; 
And yet so near, so bright and sure; 

Had I been something less, or more. 



PHILO-PCENA 

An incident of the Battle of Chaplain Hills (Perryville) 
Ky., fought by Federal and Confederates, Oct. 8, 1863. 

The orchard lands of Perryville 
Were sweet in must of aftermath; 

The dust lay thick on Chaplin Hills, 
On country road and bridle path. 

The brooks were withered at their springs,* 
And, sapless as the falling leaves, 

That spread their wan and sallow wings 
Through all the dry October eves. 

She stood beside the old well curb. 

As sweet in maiden innocence 
As the fragrant pennyroyal herb 

That filled the corners of the fence. 

" Give me a drink." She lifted up 
One hand to shade an upward look. 

And one to reach the small tin cup 
That hung from its accustomed hook. 

*It was this unusual drouth in Kentucky, precipitated 
the fight for water, for which neither general was prepared. 



224 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

Her eyes were bright, her Hps were red, 
Her gentle voice was sweet and low. 

" Give me one kiss for Love," I said, 
" Or just for luck, before I go. 

" My friends are waiting at your gate, 
The rolling drums, the bugles bleat; 

On yonder hills the reapers wait 

To sheaf and bind life's ruddy wheat." 

She did not speak. Her downcast eyes 
Were steeped in dews of sudden pain. 

As gray as when the summer skies 
Are shadowed by a sudden rain. 

She kissed me once; she kissed me twice; 

She laid her fragrant lips to mine 
And answered with a faltering voice, 

That thrilled me like the musk of wine. 

And blushing under bated breath. 

She whispered me, that they were given 

One kiss to grace a soldier's death. 

And one for Christ's dear love in Heaven. 

Life has no richer gifts to give. 
And no regrets can spoil the hour. 

In which the grace that let me live 

Till then had reached its perfect flower. 

To Honor and to Christ she prayed, 
And out on yonder battle plain. 

Red Honor's lips kissed every blade. 

And Christ's dear blood has blessed the 
slain. 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 225 

For, though war's sickle clave the land, 
When all the ruddy harvest's done, 

The dead that fell, on either hand, 

In Christ's dear blood shall all be one. 



" UNDER THE ROSE " 

A Platonic Kiss 

You kissed me, as if roses slipped 
Their rosebud necklaces, and blew 

Such breaths as never yet have dipped 
The bee in fragrance over shoe, 

While rose leaves of their color stripped 
Themselves to make a blush for you. 

Nor chide with such a cold constraint, 
As if you laid the rose in snow; 

For this the summer stores her paint, 
The dappled twilights overflow 

With motley colors, pied and quaint. 
For kisses that in flowers do grow. 

Nor pout and tease : you did not mean 
So sweet a thing. Abide this test: 

In open markets grades are seen 

Of good and bad, in price expressed; 

The buyer's purse must choose between; 
But when we give, we give the best. 

Yet if that color, sweet as bees. 
Of flower flushes teases, see 



226 SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 

How we can pluck such thorns as these, 
That bleed in blushes, easily; 

For kiss me, sweet, just as you please; 
I'll take it as it pleases me. 



AFTER DARK 

When Twilight gathers in her sheaves, 
And wheeling swallows skim the flume. 

The ploughman, turning homeward, leaves 
His plough mid-furrow in the broom. 

And through the melancholy eves 

The orange drops its milkwhite bloom. 

The old delights that go and come 
Through sorrow, in the falling dew. 

Like waves that wore a wreath of foam 
The darker that the waters grew. 

Flow round my solitary home 

At evening, when the stars are few. 

So, sad and sweet as bridal tears 
For broken homes, to see withdraw 

The child we love, have gone the years 
We climbed the frosty hills, and saw 

Descend on all the frozen meres 

The sunlight breaking through the thaw. 

Like one who in the driving snow. 

When all the untrodden paths are dim, 

Hears far-off voices, faint and low. 
Across the woodland calling him, 

I hear the loved of long ago 
Singing among the seraphim 



SPIRIT OF THE SOUTH 227 

And as the soft, dissembling light 
Falls, shadowing into dusky red, 

I think how beautiful the night 
With gathering stars is overspread. 

Like seeds of many an old delight 

Through sheaves of sorrow harvested. 



FLORIDA INDLVN LOVE CHANT 

My love is like the cocoa in the saw grass, 

As the beauty of the reed is to the betel palm. 

The fairest show her more beautiful. 

She rises betimes in the morning; 
She bathes in the beautiful water; 
She lies in the beds of the lilies. 

She bakes fresh fish in the ashes; 
She broils a broad platter of venison ; 
She gathers sweet honey and apples; 

She is sweeter than honey or apples ; 
She is fairer than plumies* or lilies. 
I love her and live in her beauty. 

*The Ponceana 



